Biohazard Cleanup Near Harmons Corner Auburn, ME

Auburn is a city in south-central Maine and the county seat of Androscoggin County, with a population of 24,061 at the 2020 census.

The city had 10,030 households in 2020 and covers 65.74 square miles, of which 59.34 square miles are land.

Auburn was first settled in 1786 as part of Bakerstown, later Poland and Minot, and was incorporated as a town on February 24, 1842, taking its name from the village in Oliver Goldsmith's 1770 poem "The Deserted Village".

It became a city on February 22, 1869, and in 1917 it was the first city in Maine to adopt a council-manager form of government.

Auburn grew into a mill town after a bridge to Lewiston opened in 1823 and the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad arrived from Portland in January 1848, with mills powered by falls on the Androscoggin and Little Androscoggin rivers.

The factory system of shoe manufacture originated at Auburn in 1835, and shoe manufacturing became the city's dominant industry, attracting many French Canadian immigrants by train from Quebec.

In 1917 one Auburn factory was producing 75 percent of the world's supply of white canvas shoes, but the shoe industry declined after World War II and the largest manufacturers closed between 1957 and 1961.

The city's seal shows a spindle with different types of shoes, and its Latin motto "Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum" means "No Steps Backward".

Auburn and its sister city Lewiston, across the Androscoggin River, are known locally as the Twin Cities or Lewiston-Auburn.

The Lewiston-Auburn Shoe Strike of 1937, one of the largest labor disputes in Maine history, involved 4,000 to 5,000 workers at its peak and brought in the Maine Army National Guard.