Map - Auburn, Alabama (Auburn)

Auburn is a city in Lee County, Alabama, United States. It is the largest city in eastern Alabama, with a 2020 population of 76,143. It is a principal city of the Auburn-Opelika Metropolitan Area. The Auburn-Opelika, AL MSA with a population of 158,991, along with the Columbus, GA-AL MSA and Tuskegee, Alabama, comprises the greater Columbus-Auburn-Opelika, GA-AL CSA, a region home to 501,649 residents.

Auburn is a historic college town and is the home of Auburn University. It is Alabama's fastest-growing metropolitan area and the 19th-fastest-growing metro area in the United States since 1990. U.S. News ranked Auburn among its top ten list of best places to live in the United States for the year 2009. The city's unofficial nickname is "The Loveliest Village on the Plains," taken from a line in the poem The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith: "Sweet Auburn! Loveliest village of the plain..."

Inhabited in antiquity by the Creek, the land on which Auburn sits was opened to settlement in 1832 with the Treaty of Cusseta. The first settlers arrived in the winter of 1836 from Harris County, Georgia. These settlers, led by Judge John J. Harper, intended to build a town that would be the religious and educational center for the area.

Auburn was incorporated on February 2, 1839, in what was then Macon County, covering an area of 2 sqmi. By that time, Methodist and Baptist churches had been established, and a school had been built and had come into operation. In the mid-1840s, separate academies for boys and girls were established in addition to the primary school. This concentration of educational institutions led to a rapid influx of families from the planter class into Auburn in the 1840s and 1850s. By 1858, of the roughly 1,000 free residents of Auburn, some 500 were students.

In 1856, the state legislature chartered a Methodist college, the East Alabama Male College in Auburn. This college, now Auburn University, opened its doors in 1859, offering a classical and liberal education.

With the advent of the Civil War in 1861, Auburn quickly emptied. All of the schools closed, and most businesses shuttered. Auburn was the site of a hospital for Texan Confederate soldiers, but only saw direct combat with the raids of Rousseau in 1864 and Wilson in 1865.

After the Civil War, Auburn's economy entered a prolonged depression that would last the remainder of the century. Public schools did not reopen until the mid-1870s, and most businesses remained closed. A series of fires in the 1860s and 1870s gutted the downtown area. East Alabama Male College was turned over to the state in 1872, and with funds from the federal Morrill Act was renamed Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College with a new mission as a land grant college. Passage of the Hatch Act in 1887 allowed for expansion of agricultural research facilities on campus.

In 1892, the college became the first four-year college in Alabama to admit women. This, combined with increased interest in scientific agriculture and engineering and new funding from business licenses, allowed the city to start expanding again. By 1910, Auburn's population had returned to its antebellum level. SIAA Conference championships won by the Auburn college's football team brought attention and support to Auburn, and helped fill the city's coffers.

Fortunes were quickly reversed with the collapse of cotton prices in the early 1920s and the subsequent Great Depression a decade later. Due to these events, the state government became unable to fund the college, and—as Auburn's economy was completely derived from the college—residents were forced into a barter economy to support themselves.

Money began to flow into Auburn again with America's entry into World War II. Auburn's campus was turned into a training ground for technical specialists in the armed forces. After the war, Auburn was flooded by soldiers returning to school on the G.I. Bill.