After his death, Lauren's father, Wallace Brown Rogers, and his maternal grandfather, Lauren Chase Eastman, created the Eastman Memorial Foundation "to promote the public welfare by founding, endowing and having maintained a public library, museum, art gallery and educational institution, within the state of Mississippi."

The Eastman, Gardiner and Rogers families had migrated to Laurel, Mississippi, from Clinton, Iowa, in the 1890s for timber resources.

A new wing was completed in 1925 giving the museum five art galleries on the first floor and space for the Laurel Library Association on the lower level, where they stayed until 1979.

In 1953 Lelia Rogers added a Reading Room and filled it with furniture from her in-laws' home and a portrait of her deceased husband, Lauren.

The walls are paneled in quarter-sawn golden oak, accented by hand-wrought ironwork by Samuel Yellin, and a ceiling of hand-molded plaster done by master craftsman Leon Hermant.

The museum owns late examples of Hudson River School painting, the first group of painters to exclusively focus on and celebrate the American landscape.

Artists such as John Frederick Kensett and Albert Bierstadt, whose works are on display in the American gallery, are typical of this movement.

The American Impressionists of the early 20th century used the image of the landscape as a means of personal expression as well as a vehicle for exploring the medium of painting itself.

Artists like John Henry Twachtman chose to portray intimate settings and quiet places in his pictures, some of which border on the abstract in their painterly quality and emphasis on color and light over form and drawing.

This time span saw a change in style; during the early 18th-century, English silver featured the abundant ornamentation of the Baroque and Rococo periods.

By the end of the Georgian period, a restrained Neo-Classical style held sway, inspired by Classical forms and designs from ancient Greece and Rome.

The earliest work in the collection is an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn entitled Virgin and Child with Cat (1654), which depicts Mary and the infant Jesus in domestic interior.

Later, artists would adapt the ukiyo-e style that had been honed on these subjects to the depiction of landscapes, as in Hiroshige's album of prints, Thirty-Six Views of Fuji (c.1828-1833).

Around 1900, Catherine Marshall Gardiner of Laurel, Mississippi, read an article about Native American baskets and found herself tempted by the possibility of collecting them.

Admission to the museum is free, due to the continued support of donors and patrons; visitor donations are encouraged.