Old Auburn

Old Auburn was an antebellum country neighborhood and post office on the old Natchez to Nashville road that a sketch by W. Calvin Wells, published in 1902, called one of the most populous, wealthy and refined neighborhoods in Mississippi until 1861. It never became a town. The post office simply followed whichever country store kept it: Kinchen A. Martin built the first, of hewn logs, in 1835; M. J. Standard bought it in 1838; J. P. Daniels opened another half a mile east in 1849; and that same year William Montgomery built a store about three miles northeast, where the post office stayed until the Civil War.

Local tradition, as Wells recorded it, says a young settler fresh from New York State had Auburn and the neighboring post offices named Utica and Cayuga after towns he knew back home. The last Auburn had a Baptist church called Harmony with a Masonic lodge room above it, and the neighborhood held large dinners on the 24th of June and the 4th of July. On May 11, 1863, two divisions of Sherman's Fifteenth Corps camped at Auburn on the march toward the railroad. Water was scarce, and Sherman reported to Grant that he was short of provisions and ammunition. The next morning Grant rode over from Cayuga and joined him.

After the war the post office was kept for only a few more years and then abandoned. In 1881 the Natchez, Jackson and Columbus Railroad was built a few miles to the east, the town of Learned grew up beside it, and Auburn's store building, the Harmony church and the Masonic lodge were all taken down and moved there. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History marked the 1863 camp in 2013.