Auburn is dressed for company, ready to welcome all its owners to a Christmas open house Sunday, 2 to 4 p.m.

The historic 1812 mansion was a gift to the City of Natchez almost 100 years ago, along with 220 acres of land around it now known as Duncan Park.

The 16 members of the Auburn Garden Club maintain the house and the grounds immediately around it.

“We were sitting around talking about how pretty the house looks with Christmas decorations,” said club member Donna Martello.

“This is a city-owned property. We decided we ought to invite city people to come see it.”

Dottie McGehee, president of the club, said she hopes the open house at Christmastime becomes an annual tradition.

Club members work hard but have a good time keeping the house and especially have fun decorating for Christmas, McGehee said.

“We want the people of Natchez to understand what we do,” she said. “Natchez residents always are welcome to come through the house free of charge. It’s always free to them.”

Greenery and holiday baubles adorn the mantelpieces, and the famous spiral staircase features luxurious garlands from the first to second floors.

Centerpieces on tables and decorated trees accentuate the season, as well.

Lyman Harding hired Levi Weeks to build Auburn for him. It would be significant in design, one of the first brick houses in the Deep South to employ the two-story columned portico on the front.

Stephen Duncan was the second owner of Auburn. He enlarged the house, adding wings on each side.

Descendants of Duncan lived in the mansion for a few years after his death in 1867 but increasingly the house was left vacant, said William D. McGehee, who compiled a history of Auburn published earlier this year.

“Once the setting of gala recitals and socials, Auburn sat silent and unused for almost 40 years,” McGehee says in the history.

City officials learned in 1910 that Duncan descendants wanted to donate the house and property to the city “for the use and benefit of the public,” the transfer document said.

The new park was to include a golf course. The old house was to remain simply an old house.

“They decided that an empty building would be simpler to deal with than a furnished one, so they sold the contents, including window treatments and chandeliers, at public auction,” William McGehee says in the history.

“Some of the items were purchased by local residents, others scattered to the four winds. Few would ever return to Auburn.”

Some original items have returned, however. During the 1930s, a coalition of Natchez club women known as the Natchez Cooperative Club gained permission to hold their meetings at Auburn and to work with city officials to restore and furnish the house.

Other organizations during the next 50 years would continue, often struggling, to restore and preserve the house.

The Auburn Garden Club, organized at Town and Country Garden Club, took its new name in 1988. Then and now, the volunteers refer to their membership as “the working club.”

They are dedicated to the task, Dottie McGehee said. And they keep a long wish list for future projects.

In the music room on the second floor, a large window is buried beneath boards put across it to create wall space. “We would love to get that window back,” she said. “We believe it is intact behind this board.”

Scraping and painting the hall upstairs is another dream the club members have for the future.

“And if someone has a harp in the attic, we have just the place for it right there,” she said, pointing to a corner in the music room.

The open house will include refreshments. “We’ll bake lots of cookies this week,” McGehee said.