Qualla: Lauren Rogers Museum of Art

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lauren Eastman Rogers was twenty-three years old, newly married, and heir to a lumber fortune when appendicitis killed him in 1921. The house being built for Lauren and his bride Lelia in Laurel, Mississippi, sat unfinished on its foundation. His father and grandfather could have torn it down. Instead, they hired Rathbone DeBuys of New Orleans to transform those half-built walls into something permanent -- not a mansion but a museum, Mississippi's first. When the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art opened its doors on May 1, 1923, the young man who never lived in that house became the reason thousands of people walk through it every year. Inside, quarter-sawn golden oak panels the walls, hand-wrought ironwork by the legendary Philadelphia blacksmith Samuel Yellin frames the doorways, and cork floors -- original to the building -- still soften every footstep. It is grief made architectural, and it is magnificent.

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art: Iowa Timber Barons on the Tallahatchie

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The story of this museum begins not in Mississippi but in Clinton, Iowa. In the 1890s, three interconnected families -- the Eastmans, the Gardiners, and the Rogers -- migrated south chasing pine timber after Iowa's forests thinned out. They did not merely settle in Laurel; they h...

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art: Five Collections Under One Roof

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What makes the Lauren Rogers Museum remarkable is not just its origin story but the breadth of what ended up inside. Five distinct collections share the building: American paintings, European art, Native American baskets, Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and British Georgian si...

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art: A Passion for Baskets

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The museum's first permanent collection was not oil paintings but woven baskets. Around 1900, Catherine Marshall Gardiner -- Lauren Rogers' great-aunt -- read an article about Native American basketry and became captivated. Her husband George encouraged her to 'go as far as she l...

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art: Craft That Outlasts a Century

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The building itself is a work of art. Rathbone DeBuys designed the exterior, while the Chicago firm of Watson and Walton handled the interior. The hand-wrought ironwork throughout the original building came from the forge of Samuel Yellin, the Philadelphia master whose ornamental...