AUBURN

A short history of Auburn

Before the first European arrived in the Green River Valley in the 1850s, the area was home to the Muckleshoot people, who were temporarily driven out by Indian wars later that decade. Several settler families arrived in the 1860s, including Levi Ballard, who set up a homestead between the Green River and White River. Ballard filed for a plat to establish a town in February 1886, naming it Slaughter for an officer slain during the Indian wars in 1855.

Slaughter was incorporated on June 13, 1891, but its name was changed two years later to Auburn on February 21, 1893, by an action of the state legislature. Newer residents had disliked the name and its connection to the word "slaughter", especially after the town's hotel was named the Slaughter House. The name Auburn was chosen in honor of Auburn, New York, for the areas' shared reliance on hops farming.

The White and Green Rivers have been a major part of the history and culture of Auburn since the area was settled with multiple locations in the city being named after either of the two rivers. Frequent flooding from the rivers caused numerous problems for the people living in the community with one outcome being the creation of Mountain View Cemetery over on one of the hills overlooking the valley. It was not until the completion of the Mud Mountain Dam and the Howard A. Hanson Dam, along the White River and Green River respectively, that the flooding would cease and allow the city to grow without the aforementioned hurdle impeding the growth.

In 1917 the city, in response to the growing of the Japanese community, donated some of the land in Pioneer Cemetery to the White River Buddhist Church. A little over ten years later, Rev. Giryo Takemura, minister of the church at the time, and his future son-in-law, Chiyokichi Natsuhara, raised money to replace the old wooden sticks and columns that had been in use as gravestones at the cemetery with more durable concrete markers. The interwar period saw several Japanese-American baseball teams from the area compete in the courier league with the White River All-Stars enjoying particularly large success winning four of the July 4th tournaments.

With the Attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War, Japanese immigrants and the Japanese-American community as a whole were largely seen with unwarranted distrust by the majority white population, including in Auburn. Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, led to the city's Japanese-American population being relocated to internment camps. After the war, of about 300 Japanese families living in Auburn only around 25 returned. In 1980, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians found that this detainment was an unjust act in its report.

A local real estate developer announced plans for a large planned community in the hills southeast of Auburn in 1979, using 1,500 acres (610 ha) of assembled plots. The neighborhood was named Lakeland Hills and began construction in 1985, growing to 80 homes in its first three years. Auburn and Bonney Lake competed to annex the entirety of Lakeland Hills in the late 1990s, with Auburn voting in 1997 to become the third King County city to annex portions of Pierce County. The two cities reached a compromise on water utility rights in the Pierce County portion of the neighborhood that allowed Auburn to complete its annexation of Lakeland Hills by the end of the decade. By 2007, the development had 3,600 homes with 6,000 residents, a new elementary school, and a shopping center.

In 2008, Auburn annexed the West Hill and Lea Hill neighborhoods of unincorporated King County, adding 15,000 residents and expanding its land area by 26 percent. A 155-acre (63 ha) exclave of Kent, the Bridges neighborhood, was annexed by Auburn on January 1, 2024, after the two cities agreed to the transfer to simplify municipal services in the area. The neighborhood had originally been annexed by Kent in 1987 for use as a water reservoir, which was never built and instead developed into residential use. It was then surrounded by Lea Hill, later annexed into Auburn.

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Auburn, Washington, revision 1374756589 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.