Built for Lyman and Elizabeth Harding, Auburn introduced academic architecture to the Mississippi Territory. Weeks (1776–1819) described the house in an 1812 letter. “The brick house I am building. … is designed for the most magnificent building in the Territory. The body of this house is … two stories with a geometrical staircase to ascend to the second story. This is the first house in the Territory on which was ever attempted any of the orders of Architecture.”
Auburn was originally a five-bay symmetrical brick building with a hipped roof and three-bay portico, an ensemble replicated so often regionally, it became known as the Natchez Mansion form (see Development of the Natchez Mansion, pp. 46–47). The portico’s giant-order Roman Ionic columns support a full molded entablature with modillioned cornice that encircles the house. The upper and lower doors are crowned with semicircular fanlights echoed in the pediment by an oval light with radiating muntins. Doors and windows have marble keystones, and the portico’s windows are floor-length. Sheltered by the rear gallery, the original penciled mortar joints of the Flemish bond brickwork remain visible.
Auburn’s portico was one of the earliest giant-order porticos in the nation. It was immediately influential and copied throughout the South, including the giant-order columns added to the White House (1820s) in Washington, D.C. Although the portico was innovative, the interior Georgian millwork was old-fashioned. A doorway with swan’s neck pediment derives from Plate XXVI of William Salmon’s 1734 Palladio Londinensis, and another with a broken pediment and shell cartouche comes from William Paine’s 1758 Builder’s Companion. The circular stair appears in Paine’s British Palladio (1786).
In 1827, Stephen and Catherine Duncan purchased Auburn. One of the South’s wealthiest cotton planters, Duncan owned approximately a thousand slaves by the 1850s on his eleven plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Auburn was the Duncans’ suburban retreat, and they probably had approximately thirty enslaved workers here. About 1840, Duncan added recessed symmetrical wings and a rear colonnade to Auburn and updated the interior with marble mantelpieces. Surviving antebellum outbuildings include a two-story brick kitchen with slave quarters on the second story, a rare one-story temple-form frame billiard hall, a one-story brick dairy, and a brick carriage house/barn.
In 1911, Duncan heirs deeded Auburn and its associated acreage to the City of Natchez to be used as a public park, a use it retains today.