Catharine Hollaway Rix was born on October 10, 1803, in North Carolina, the daughter of Robert Rix and Mary Flewellen Rix. Her father died in 1802 in Nash County, North Carolina — Catharine never knew him. She was raised by her mother Mary, who later remarried Captain Meredith Joiner and moved to Houston County, Georgia in 1818 — ten years before James Bryan purchased Lot 242. Catharine's family was already in Houston County when she arrived as a bride.

Mary Flewellen Joiner lived to November 29, 1852. The Houston County obituary described her husband as among the pioneer settlers of the county. She died nine years after her daughter's husband, five years before the war, and nine years before Catharine herself. She outlived Catharine by nine years and is buried in Houston County.

Catharine Hollaway Rix married James Averette Bryan on November 25, 1823, in Clinton, Georgia — the seat of Jones County, forty miles north of where her mother had settled on the Ocmulgee frontier. She was twenty years old. James was twenty-two.

They were married for twenty-three years and ten months. They had ten children.

The house on Lot 242 was completed in 1832, nine years into the marriage. By then Robert was six, Troup was four, Hugh was two, and Catharine was carrying Cornelius. The boys had watched the house go up. She had managed the household through four Georgia summers in whatever shelter preceded it.

Ten children arrived between 1824 and 1847:

Laura was born six weeks after James died — the tenth child, the one thing in that spring that was entirely new. Catharine had lost her husband and gained a daughter in the same season, neither one waiting on the other.

James A. Bryan died on March 22, 1847. The plantation he left behind covered 1,200 acres — grown from the original 202-acre Lot 242 purchased in 1828 through fourteen years of acquisition. The estate was opened with the Houston County Court of Ordinary and Robert came home from Cincinnati to administer it. Catharine held the household.

For fourteen years she managed the house, the children's schooling, the plantation's domestic operations, and the business of raising a family through the peak cotton years. The estate records show her children's school fees paid each season — board in Macon, tutors who could be reached on a morning's ride. She kept the house running the way James had built it to run.

Catharine H. Bryan died on May 6, 1861. She was fifty-seven years old. Fort Sumter had fallen three weeks before. Her son Troup died that same year — September 26, 1861, of disease in the Virginia mountain camps. Her sons Hugh, Cornelius, and Abner mustered in July. She did not live to see what followed any of them.

The estate records show the mourning goods arriving from Macon within weeks of her death — black bonnets, black silk, velvet ribbon. The family dressed for grief in the same season Georgia mobilized for war.