City homes:

Electricity: No they would have been lit by candles or kerosene of some kind.

Water: Only in the most modern and wealthy homes would there have been indoor plumbing and running hot and cold water. This would likely have been due to the home having its own system for collecting, heating and purifying water to be delivered through pipes to the rest of the house.

Sewage: None. Sewage in the cities was often simply dumped out into the already filthy streets or into a backyard pit. This resulted in a low amount of people drinking water. They preferred tea or coffee.

Structure: City homes were already being built close together and upwards which meant there were more floors and fewer rooms on each floor. Also the houses tended to be narrow and long. Most city homes had three floors.

County homes:

Electricity: No everything was lit by candles and kerosene, which is why so little was done at night.

Water: Again wealthy families may have had their own plumbing but would not have been connected to an outside source of any kind.

Sewage: More likely that not it was simply deposited in a large pit somewhere, perhaps near the typical outhouse.

Structure: Country homes tended to be more palatial in structure, that is wider and with perhaps more depth. They would contain many rooms on one floor and were usually no more than two stories tall though occasionally a grand one may be three. They also incorporated several other structures, which lay around the home and may include a detached kitchen, slavery quarters and work buildings.

The wealthy would have at least one and usually several parlor and sitting rooms, a library, several bedrooms for guests in addition to the family's rooms. There would probably be a billiard or smoking room for the gentleman and possibly a hunting room as well. The women would have had a dressing room for housing their gowns and preparing for the day of a big event.

Poorer houses would probably contain a single parlor, a dining room much smaller than that of a wealthy home, perhaps a reading room and the chambers for the family with perhaps one bedroom for guests. The rooms would have been of a much smaller scale.

Everyone would have had a stove of some sort. Cooking was much more difficult due to lack of modern conveniences such as canned spices and pre mixed batters. There was a pantry scaled to fit the household with large containers, possibly even barrel sized, for flour, sugar, rice, grits, meal and other staples. Any combined mixtures such as yeast had to be made by hand. The meat would have been housed away from the kitchen in a meat house generally, except for in the city where it was usually bought on a daily basis and not stored. Coffee came in bags of raw beans and had to be ground each morning before morning coffee could be served. Pie was typical with all three meals. There would have been a baker's cabinet in the kitchen, which would store all of the pies, cakes and other sweets that had been prepared, often on one day for the whole week.


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