Leila Ross Wilburn (1885–1967) was an early 20th-century architect, one of the first women in Georgia to enter that profession. Early life Leila Ross Wilburn was born in Macon, Georgia. She was the first of five children of Joseph Gustavus Wilburn and Leila Ada Ross. Her father was a bookkeeper while her mother was a graduate of Wesleyan Female College in Macon who had studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. In the midst of the economic depression of 1895, her family moved to Atlanta. From 1902 to 1904, Wilburn attended Agnes Scott Institute where she studied liberal arts and science. She also took private lessons in architectural drawing. After graduating college, Wilburn traveled around the country to study the emerging Arts and Crafts movement and created a library of 5,000 photographs of inspiring homes. In 1906-1907 she apprenticed with B. R. Padgett and Son, a firm specializing in residences. She received most of her training with Padgett and became the South's second female architect (the first was Henrietta Cuttino Dozier). Her first commission at Padgett was a three-story building that became the YMCA gymnasium at Georgia Military Academy (now Woodward Academy). Career as an independent architect In 1909, Wilburn opened her own firm. She focused on home design which was considered the most appropriate field of architecture for a woman. Fittingly, she opened her office not in the Candler Building, where architects' offices were concentrated, but in the Peters Building, occupied by realtors and developers. Rather than catering to wealthy clients, Wilburn marketed her residential designs to the middle class through a series of plan books. This was a propitious choice as Atlanta's suburbs were expanding and there was a need for new apartment buildings in the city. Thanks to her location in the Peters Building, she developed close ties with contractors, builders, and developers, who bought her plan books and her plans and built her houses by the hundreds. Her plan books allowed middle class buyers to benefit from her expertise without having to pay the fees of a professional architect. Beginning with Southern Homes and Bungalows in 1914, Wilburn’s published nine plan books. She is the only female architect known to have published plan books. In her first plan book, Wilburn emphasized "homes suitable for the climatic conditions of the Southeast" featuring porches, verandas, sun porches and sleeping porches. Stock plans cost $25 to $40, while