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 helped create it. The Rogers family built grand residences on broad avenues, endowed public parks and schools, and ran the lumber operations that gave the young city its economic heartbeat. Lauren Chase Eastman, the family patriarch and Lauren Rogers' maternal grandfather, was a shrewd art collector decades before a museum existed to house his taste. Wallace Brown Rogers, Lauren's father, was grooming his only son to inherit both the business and the family's deep philanthropic commitments to Laurel. When Lauren died, the two men channeled their loss into the Eastman Memorial Foundation, chartered to promote public welfare through a library, museum, art gallery, and educational institution within Mississippi.

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 silver. The American collection anchors itself in Hudson River School landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and John Frederick Kensett, alongside Impressionist work by John Henry Twachtman and canvases by Winslow Homer. The European galleries hold a Rembrandt etching from 1654 -- Virgin and Child with Cat -- and an 1856 pastel by Jean-Francois Millet titled First Steps, a piece so compelling that Vincent van Gogh later painted his own version of it. The Georgian silver collection, donated by local newspaper publishers Harriet and Thomas Gibbons, focuses on tea service pieces from the era between 1714 and 1830. And the Japanese gallery displays Edo Period prints, images from what the Japanese called the 'floating world' of theater, pleasure, and landscape.

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 liked,' and she did. Catherine traveled to reservations, corresponded with dealers and weavers, and built a national network of fellow collectors during what enthusiasts call the golden age of basket collecting. She planned to gather only contemporary pieces, but as she later wrote, 'the lure of old and fine work specimens soon gained the ascendancy.' By 1923, Catherine had assembled nearly 500 baskets representing tribes from across North America -- one of the most comprehensive collections of Native basketry in the Southeastern United States. She donated the entire collection to the new museum that year. Looking back a decade later, Gardiner called the endeavor 'a work of great charm.' The museum has continued adding to the collection, particularly baskets from Southeastern tribes, but Catherine's original vision remains its foundation.

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 metalwork graces the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Yale University. The ceiling plasterwork was executed by Leon Hermant, a master craftsman who rendered intricate naturalistic motifs by hand. A new wing completed in 1925 gave the museum five galleries on the first floor and space for the Laurel Library Association on the lower level, where the library remained until 1979. In 1953, Lauren's widow Lelia added a Reading Room furnished with pieces from her in-laws' home and a portrait of the husband she had barely begun a life with. A 1983 expansion introduced a grand staircase in Tennessee black marble, later crowned by a large Dale Chihuly glass sculpture. The most recent addition, the Sanderson Gallery, arrived in 2013. Admission has always been free.