Laurel’s lumber barons established their estates along N. 5th Avenue and sprinkled in elegant institutional structures, commissioning architects from New Orleans or Chicago to design some of Mississippi’s finest early-twentieth-century buildings.
At 520 N. 5th, a brick wall encloses the c. 1901 residence of George S. Gardiner, called the “builder of Laurel” in his obituary. His two-story frame Colonial Revival house is fronted by a monumental pedimented Ionic portico and a delicate Federal-style entrance. It became St. John’s Day School in 1950. His brother Philip S. Gardiner lived next door at 530 N. 5th in an Italian Renaissance-influenced house (c. 1910); its red brick walls are accented by glazed terra-cotta classical details.
Gardiner’s financial contributions and architectural opinions helped shape the Italian Romanesque-styled St. John’s Episcopal Church (1914, Frank A. Colby; 541 N. 5th). The tall nave is balanced by lower aisles, and the masons (supervised by Jackson contractor I. C. Garber) created intricate facade designs with local pink buff brick laid up in a Flemish bond. Around 1910, George Gardiner commissioned DeBuys, Churchill and Labouisse to design a house for his daughter, Juliet Rogers, and her husband, Newell, at 706 N. 6th Avenue. This unusual monolithic concrete Mediterranean-influenced structure has an original peach-tinted stucco finish. The same firm produced the Charles Green House (c. 1910; 756 N. 5th), also of concrete but in a Georgian Revival style.