Living in Auburn, MA

About Auburn

Auburn was incorporated on April 10, 1778, from parts of Worcester, Sutton, Leicester and Oxford, and named Ward for General Artemas Ward; most of it had been Worcester's South Parish, first settled in 1714. In 1837 the Post Office complained that Ward was too similar to the nearby town of Ware, and the town became Auburn. Wellington, Dark and Kettle Brooks flow north and east through town, and in the 19th century they powered mill villages: Jeremy Stone built a brick woolen mill and worker housing at Stoneville in 1834, and Pondville's mills made yarn and satinets. The Norwich and Worcester Railroad began service through Auburn in 1840, and by 1900 a streetcar line ran from Worcester along Southbridge and Central Streets toward Oxford.

On March 16, 1926, Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket from what was then the Asa Ward Farm. The site is now inside the town-owned Pakachoag Golf Course on Upland Street, where a granite marker beside the ninth fairway shows the spot; it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966. The town's commercial center is Drury Square, where Auburn and Southbridge Streets meet: one- to three-story buildings set back behind parking, with Auburn High School on the northwest side of Southbridge Street and the public library, Goddard Park and fire headquarters on the southeast side. The Auburn Mall, opened in 1971 at 385 Southbridge Street, sits on Route 12 near the junction of the Turnpike, I-290 and I-395.

The state approved Auburn's 2024 Housing Production Plan for July 9, 2024 to July 8, 2029, and certified it on July 21, 2025. Two former elementary schools have been redeveloped by Pennrose as mixed-income rental apartments: 55 units in the Mary D. Stone School at 10 Church Street, opened in May 2022, and 60 units in the Julia Bancroft School at 3 Vinal Street, whose opening was celebrated in December 2022. Under the state's MBTA Communities zoning law, Auburn is classed as an adjacent community that must zone for at least 750 multi-family units on at least 50 acres (the state counts 6,999 housing units in town in 2020), and the state's compliance list (as of October 21, 2026) includes Auburn.

Homes in Auburn

The state's MBTA Communities table counts 6,999 housing units in Auburn in 2020. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's 1984 survey found two-story, double-chimney multi-family worker houses and one-story duplexes of about 1860 at Stoneville, gable-end, side-passage houses built in large numbers around the mill villages in the 1880s and 1890s, a few triple-deckers, and bungalows and 1930s and 1940s Colonial Revival houses around the Center, Stoneville and Pakachoag.