New Auburn was once called Stump Village, because tree stumps speckled the streets during its rapid growth around 1870.

It had been a countryside of fields and a few scattered farmhouses along two country roads between the Androscoggin River’s Great Falls and Danville. The land boom brought rapid growth. Streets could not be cleared fast enough, leading to the community’s nickname.

Rose O’Brien, popular reporter and feature writer for the Lewiston Evening Journal, began her “sketch” of New Auburn in March of 1950. She drew upon interviews with many people who could “remember when,” such as Judge James Pulsifer of Cook Street; Jacob and Moses Shapiro, whose department store was lost to a fire in 1912; Miss Georgiana Lunt, librarian and resident of New Auburn; relatives of Barker Mill agents; sisters and the Mother Superior of St. Louis Convent; and several teachers and local business owners.

She recalled how this locality had mushroomed in just 80 years prior to 1950, weathering extreme hardships from fire, flood and financial challenges in the 1930s. That part of Auburn, then in Danville, grew from similar tests of character beginning with the post-Civil War depression of 1873. O’Brien told how that depression “hit the Barker Mill district in its infancy and sent stock in the Barker Mill (on the Little Androscoggin River), the backbone of the new community, down to ten cents a share.”

The early New Auburn residents also rallied from the hardships of a major flood in 1896.

Much of O’Brien’s account comes from her talks with 84-year-old Judge Pulsifer. She tells of the judge’s memories of “clinging tightly to his father’s hand as he walked over the covered bridge that spanned the Little Androscoggin and saw the Town House.” It was described as a large barn-like building near the corner of Pulsifer and Second streets, which were just two dirt roads then.

It was on this road that Laban Loring of Hingham bought farmland in 1822. He built the big house that was a stagecoach tavern for many years. O’Brien said it was later occupied by James F. Pollard, who owned New Auburn’s Community Theater.

According to Judge Pulsifer, the old-time dividing line between Danville and Auburn “ran from Profile Rock in the Falls to the easterly end of the Elm House, straight through the old cemetery on the north side of the Elm Street Universalist Church and on to the Littlefield Tavern on the Old Hotel Road.

The judge remembered the day that he and Judge Nahum Morrill of Auburn were walking on Court Street. They stopped to watch workmen installing sidewalk in front of the Elm House. Judge Morrill told the workmen not to remove a small stone marker that identified the old town line, so the workmen built over the old Auburn-Danville line.

“I bet not half a dozen people know it’s there,” Judge Pulsifer told O’Brien.

Many “home town” boys started enterprises despite the “rugged business years of the early 1930s,” O’Brien wrote. She said first and second generation businesses were becoming well-established “when along came May 15, 1933.

“When the fire started that windy afternoon in the Pontbriand garage no one was too concerned,” O’Brien said. “Then suddenly New Auburn was a sheet of flames. Everyone has his own story of the New Auburn fire, but the important story is that not one life was lost, just property, and as New Auburn people said, that could and would be rebuilt.”

That catastrophic blaze left $2 million in damage. A total 249 buildings burned and 2,067 people were homeless.

Recovering from that tragedy of fire was a remarkable effort, and in the following two or three years, the people of New Auburn faced additional challenges. The shoe workers’ strike of 1935 affected many residents and businesses of New Auburn, and that struggling community was hit again when the massive flood of 1936 “swept out the South Bridge, swamped the business section, and isolated New Auburn for a couple of days.”

In her look at New Auburn in 1950, O’Brien counted more than 90 businesses firms in the community. She said, “New Auburn is always ready to bet on their future. That’s what people mean when they talk about the New Auburn spirit.”

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by email at [email protected].