Auburn: The House That Set the Standard

When architect Levi Weeks completed Auburn in eighteen twelve, he introduced something new to the Mississippi Territory: academic Classical order architecture. Before Auburn, frontier construction in the territory was functional and rough. Weeks brought a trained vocabulary of columns, proportions, and interior spaces that set the template for the Natchez plantation house style that followed.

Weeks had come to Natchez from New York, where his career had been derailed by a murder trial in which he was acquitted. The commission for Auburn gave him a fresh start and a permanent place in American architectural history. The mansion was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-four and a Mississippi Landmark in nineteen eighty-four. It now sits in Duncan Park in Natchez, open to visitors, with a restored brick kitchen and slave quarters that complicate the elegance of the main house.