Dani C.
Yelp
Auburn Plantation
We toured this house during the "Hope Restoration Project". The tour was amazing. So much history and the house is absolutely stunning! Here's a little history lesson.
In 1811, Lyman Harding, the first Attorney General of Mississippi, hired Levi Weeks to build the mansion. Levi designed the house to be, in his words, the "most magnificent building in the state." After Harding died in 1820, the building was bought by Dr. Stephen Duncan.
Here's a little history on Dr. Duncan,... He was born and studied medicine in Pennsylvania, but moved to Natchez in 1808 and became the wealthiest cotton planter and the second-largest slave owner in the U.S. with over 2,200 slaves. He owned 15 cotton and sugar plantations, served as President of the Bank of Mississippi, and held major investments in railroads and lumber.
He became an influential Mississippi backer of the American Colonization Society, which promoted the removal of freed American blacks to Liberia, a colonial settlement in West Africa. Under his leadership during the 1830s, the Mississippi Colonization Society removed 571 African-Americans to Liberia.
He was a steadfast Unionist during the American Civil War. He tried unsuccessfully to lobby the Lincoln Administration to help him protect his slaveholdings after the Union army occupied large swaths of Mississippi. But appeals from Duncan and his family members largely went unheeded. In late 1863, he left the Confederacy by Union gunboat and relocated to New York City where he lived until his death in 1867.
Auburn and 222 acres was sold by the family to the city of Natchez in 1911 and is now a historic house museum in a public park.
