Biohazard Cleanup Near West Aurora Aurora, TX

Aurora is a city in Wise County, Texas, about 25 miles northwest of Fort Worth, and it was settled in the late 1850s and named by William O. Stanfield, who was impressed by the beauty of the site - Aurora is the Roman goddess of dawn.

Aurora incorporated on August 21, 1882, and by the mid-1880s it was a thriving trading center for county farmers with two schools, two cotton gins, two hotels, fifteen shops, and a population estimated between 750 and 3,000.

Aurora is famous worldwide for the Aurora UFO incident of April 1897, when the Dallas Morning News reported that a mystery airship crashed into a windmill outside town and its pilot, described as 'not an inhabitant of this world,' was buried in the Aurora Cemetery - a legend the town still acknowledges on its own city website.

The alleged 1897 airship crash predates the Roswell incident by about 50 years, and a Texas state historical marker at the cemetery notes the legend, though the cemetery association has refused all requests to exhume the purported alien grave.

A spotted fever epidemic in late 1888 emptied much of Aurora by 1889, and when the railroad routed through nearby Rhome instead, the town declined so sharply that its post office closed in 1901 and the 1900 census counted only 257 people.

Aurora was saved from extinction when State Highway 114 was built through it in 1939, and in the early 1970s it revived as a bedroom community for Fort Worth commuters.

The 2020 census counted 1,390 people and 465 households in Aurora, with a median age of 40.6 years and about 87.5% of occupied homes owner-occupied.

Aurora covers about 3.7 square miles of land in southeastern Wise County along State Highway 114, ten miles southeast of Decatur, the county seat.

Aurora students are served by the Northwest Independent School District, attending Seven Hills Elementary, Chisholm Trail Middle School, and Northwest High School.

Aurora Cemetery, established on land donated to the local Masonic lodge in 1877, remains in use with more than 800 graves and is one of the oldest community landmarks in Wise County.