I dunno ....your thinking city Not necessarily and I am thinking rural hamlet or country .

The  1780's house ;  also known as cobbler house; was a wide plank salt box ; where as the name implies the cobbler lived and worked .

Using the same argument ; we have here in the Souf many antebellum houses in the country where the doctors examined their patients ; these were separate rooms  within the corner of the house with their own entrances and exits (one for the public and one for the private )  . This makes perfect sense, and a hell of a lot more sense than a "mourning room" or "mourning doors," unless those rooms were in a house occupied  by an undertaker.   But it seems to me that Mortuary Sciences pretty much developed during and as a result of the Civil War (the late unpleasantness, to you), and that there may not have been much in the way of Death Professionals before then.

It stands to reason that a fabricator ;in this case a cobbler could have his own "Public " part of the house much in the same way a publican would offer a bar in his house with its own entrances and exits Exactly so.  The more I think about this "mourning room and mourning door" business, the more it sounds like some realtor bullshit. We all know how knowledgable realtors are--unless a house is a contemporary or a ranch, it's a colonial.

In the Hebrides I went to a wake with the deceased in the bar;(pub) ....as there was no other public place

In the cobblers case

Shoes and boots had to be fitted ;so a place to receive the public in your rural home might be in order .

and if your skills were doubled to that  of a rural mortician Ya think the Ancestral Pyes wanted the earthly remains of their dearly beloved to be.....taken care of by a goddam shoemaker?  I don't think so. ; why not multi task in the same room   

making it the mourning or the borning room which ever the case may be  Fuhgeddaboudit.

 

I dunno is the subject dead ? are we beating a dead horse ?  As the street cleaner said to the dead horse, "no more shit out of you!";did the cobblers children have shoes ? Is a frog's asshole watertight?

is it better to be loved than feared ? and as my Uncle wiggly book once said if nurse jane fuzzy wuzzy makes poridge in the morning ....wait make that mourning /Py; Ralph