McDonough Homes for Sale

What McDonough is like

Henry County was created in May 1821, Georgia’s fifty-second county, named for the Revolutionary War patriot Patrick Henry. McDonough was incorporated as its county seat on December 17, 1823, and named for Thomas Macdonough, the naval officer who beat a British squadron on Lake Champlain in the War of 1812. It was laid out the way county towns were laid out then: a square, with the courthouse in the middle and the business district facing it on four sides.

That square is still the center of town. The current Henry County Courthouse was built in 1897, restored in 1981, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. A restored 1920 Standard Oil service station sits nearby. City Hall is at 136 Keys Ferry Street, a short walk away.

The 2020 census counted 29,051 people inside the city limits. The county around it counted 240,712, up from 203,922 in 2010, and that growth is the single fact that explains most of the housing stock: a small old core, a very large ring of subdivisions built in the last thirty years, and new construction still going in.

City limits and the mailing address

This matters more in McDonough than in most places. The city has about 29,000 residents, but the McDonough mailing address reaches a long way into unincorporated Henry County, including communities such as Ola, Luella and Kelleytown, none of which are incorporated towns.

So a house advertised as being in McDonough may be in the City of McDonough, or it may be in the county. Which one it is decides who provides some of the services, how the tax bill is put together and which local government sets the rules for things like permits. It is a five-minute check and worth doing before you write an offer.

The square, Heritage Park and Southern Belle Farm

Downtown McDonough runs an active events calendar off the square – a Main Street Market, a Christmas parade, a scarecrow contest in the autumn. The city calls itself the Geranium City, and the Geranium Festival fills the square on the third Saturday in May.

Heritage Park is the big one: 129 acres with a 0.9-mile paved walking track, two playgrounds, three pavilions, four lighted softball fields, community gardens, a senior center and a library. On a 2.5-acre hill inside the park is the Veterans Wall of Honor, a 75-foot granite wall engraved with battle scenes and quotations, dedicated on Veterans Day in 2008. The park also holds the Heritage Park Veterans Museum and a historic village with an 1827 settler’s log cabin, a detached cookhouse, a two-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, the first library building in Henry County and a 1934 steam locomotive.

Southern Belle Farm on Turner Church Road is a 330-acre working farm that opens to the public for strawberry picking in spring and a corn maze and pumpkin patch in autumn. It is the kind of place that ends up on a family’s calendar every year once they move here.

Neighborhoods and housing

Outside the old grid around the square, McDonough is overwhelmingly single-family subdivisions, with townhomes in the newer developments. Because so much of it was built in distinct waves – late 1990s, mid 2000s, the last few years – the practical differences between neighborhoods here are age, lot size, HOA rules and which I-75 exit you end up using.

Homes closer to the square trade proximity to downtown for older construction. Homes out toward Ola and the eastern side of the county trade a longer drive for more land. The live listings at the top of this page show what is actually on the market in McDonough right now, which is a better starting point than any general description of the town.

Schools

Public schools are run by Henry County Schools, a county-wide district. High schools with McDonough addresses or serving parts of the McDonough area include McDonough High School, Eagle’s Landing High School, Union Grove High School, Ola High School and Luella High School.

Henry County has been redrawing attendance zones as it grows, so the school a house was zoned for five years ago is not necessarily the school it is zoned for now. Confirm the zoned schools for a specific address with the district, and get current performance information from the district or the Georgia Department of Education rather than from a listing.

Commuting from McDonough

I-75 has three exits serving McDonough – 216, 218 and 221 – and downtown Atlanta is about 28 miles northwest. Which exit you use matters: they feed different parts of the city, and the morning queue is not the same at each.

US-23 runs through the middle of town as the older surface route, and GA-20, GA-42, GA-81 and GA-155 fan out from the square to the rest of the county. GA-20 west is the road to Hampton and EchoPark Speedway; GA-81 runs northeast toward Conyers and I-20. For anyone heading to the east or south side of the Perimeter, I-675 north out of Stockbridge is usually the faster way onto I-285.

If you work on the south or west side of the metro, drive the route at the hour you would actually drive it before you buy. I-75 north of McDonough behaves very differently at 6.45am than it does at eleven o’clock on a Saturday.

Nearby towns

• Locust Grove
• Stockbridge
• Hampton
• Jonesboro