Auburn, Massachusetts
A Short History of Auburn
A town assembled out of four other towns’ leftovers, named for a Revolutionary general, renamed because the Post Office kept getting it wrong, and remembered for two and a half seconds of flight on a hillside farm.
Four Towns’ Edges
Auburn did not start as a place. It started as the outer corners of Worcester, Leicester, Sutton and Oxford, the parts far enough from each town center that getting to a meetinghouse on a Sunday was an ordeal. Families living out there wanted their own town, and on April 10, 1778, in the middle of the Revolution, the General Court incorporated those pieces as one. They called it Ward, after the Revolutionary hero General Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury. The oldest part of it is Pakachoag Hill, where a Nipmuc village stood; the earliest surviving description of that village is Daniel Gookin’s account of a visit there in 1674 with the Reverend John Eliot, when about twenty families lived on the hill.
Why the Name Changed
Ward lasted 59 years, and what ended it was the post office. Ward and Ware are one letter apart, and the mail for the two towns kept arriving in the wrong one. On November 14, 1836 the town met about it, elected Joseph Stone chairman, and voted to petition the General Court, attaching a deposition from the Ward postmaster, the Reverend Miner G. Pratt, describing the confusion. The act changing the name from Ward to Auburn passed on February 17, 1837. Read the seal in the corner of any town document and you will see both dates side by side, Ward 1778 and Auburn 1837, which is a town recording in its own official mark that it changed its mind.
Farms, Then Factories Somewhere Else
For its first century Auburn ran on agriculture and home industry, the kind of small workshop economy that flourished across New England in the early 1800s. Then Worcester’s factories grew, and Auburn became the place those workers lived rather than the place they worked. The farms went with them. The town’s own history puts the arithmetic plainly: more than 100 working farms listed in 1857, and four left by 1957.
Two and a Half Seconds
On March 16, 1926, Robert Goddard set a small steel frame in a field on the Ward family’s farm on Pakachoag Hill, lit a rocket fed by liquid oxygen and gasoline, and watched it climb 41 feet and come down again. It is the first liquid-fueled rocket flight in the world, and every launch since is descended from it. Goddard is called the father of modern rocketry. The Ward family turned the farm into a golf course in 1939, the town bought the 54 acres in 1981 with a federal grant, and since January 1, 2016 the town has run the course itself. The launch site is the midpoint between the tee and the green on the ninth fairway, marked by a stone monument, and it has been a National Historic Landmark since 1966. The ground where the space age started is a line item your Town Meeting votes on.
The Highways Arrive
What made modern Auburn was pavement. I-290, I-90, I-395, Route 12 and Route 20 all meet here, and once they did, industry and retail followed the exits out of the city. The town’s population has grown by only a few thousand since the 1970s while its commercial development grew far faster, which is why a town of sixteen thousand people carries shopping and industry sized for many more. Holding onto a small town character while that happens is, in the town’s own words, a struggle it is still having.
Governing a Bigger Town
Auburn outgrew the open town meeting where every voter votes. In 1959 the Legislature passed a special act letting Auburn adopt a representative town meeting instead, and the town took it: five precincts, 24 members each, elected by their own neighbors to three year terms. The other big structural change came much later, when the Reorganization Plan of 2012 rebuilt the town’s departments into the shape they hold today. Both were decisions the town made about itself, and both are still the machinery you are living inside.
Sources: Town of Auburn, About Our Town and the town seal; A Historical Sketch of Auburn, Massachusetts (Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the Auburn Centennial Committee, 1937); the Town Clerk’s published guide for Town Meeting members, in the Town of Auburn Document Center; Town of Auburn, Reorganization Plan of 2012.