New York - Auburn
Auburn (650 alt.,28,574 pop.), once the junction point of the old Seneca and Genesee Turnpikes, has lost its robust stagecoach glamor. Cayuga County seat, important manufacturing and farm shopping center, it is an attractive city of Victorian homes on broad, quiet, tree-shaded streets. Through the Saturday afternoon shopping crowds on Genesee Street runs a farm atmosphere straight from the pages of David Harum. The factory sections of the town, principally in its western reaches, are the usual grimy huddle of brick blocks and smokestacks surrounded by nondescript homes of workers. The chief industrial products are rope, farm machinery, Diesel engines, shoes, carpets, and rugs. Foreign groups—Italians, Poles, and Russians, comprising about 20 per cent of the population—find employment in the factories, though some of the Italians do a little farming. A small Negro group, including descendants of runaway slaves, revere the memory of 'Aunt Harriet' Tubman, who helped slaves find freedom and who used the house and land given to her by Governor Seward as a home for indigent Negroes.
In 1793 Colonel John Hardenbergh, surveyor and Revolutionary veteran, built the first cabin on the present site of Auburn and a year later erected the first gristmill on the Owasco Outlet. At a meeting in 1805 the present name was taken from Goldsmith's The Deserted Village. In 1810 Governor De Witt Clinton reported that Auburn had 90 dwellings, 17 mills along the Outlet, and an incorporated library of 200 volumes. The opening of the State prison in 1817 and of the theological seminary four years later stimulated growth. In the 1840's Auburn was a rallying point for politicians. With William H. Seward and other national figures as adopted sons, it had hopes of becoming the State capital: Capitol Street is a reminder of that unrealized ambition.
Transportation facilities, abundant water power, and the practice, which was not abolished until 1882, of hiring out prison labor at ridiculously low rates, attracted industry. In 1818 Joseph Wadsworth transferred his scythe factory from Massachusetts to Auburn; in 1852 Carhart & Nye began the manufacture of carpets; in 1858 David Munson Osborne, a native son, founded the D.M. Osborne Company, which was absorbed in 1903 by the International Harvester Company. After 120 years existence, the Auburn Theological Seminary, chartered by the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1819, was merged with the Union Theological Seminary, New York City.

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