Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Auburn, Colorado


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. North America1000 02:16, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Auburn, Colorado

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

A great deal of padding does not get past the reality that this is yet another rail siding, with no surrounding community. Mangoe (talk) 23:27, 28 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Question I disagree about "padding" and "reality" (see my !vote below), but what evidence do you have that there is any rail siding involved? I see a whole lot of AFDs about places, with assertions as here that the place is merely a rail siding and never a community.  I am wondering if some/many of these AFD nominations are just bogus.  User:Mangoe, could you please explain about this one? --Doncram (talk) 18:09, 29 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Colorado-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 23:31, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
 * There is guidance on this as per Notability (geographic features). Auburn is not an incorporated place nor is it a census-designated place, so there is no automatic notability that a legally recognized place would have. Nonetheless unincorporated communities can be notable if sufficient reliable sources exist for the subject, a la WP:GNG. thecrossingstory.com is a Rocky Mountain News repository site from the Denver Public Library, and Page 2 and Page 4 are among those with Significant coverage of the topic. As per those pages a school did exist in the past. I'm trying to find at least one more published source about this (if there is a state specialist encyclopedia of Colorado covering settlements like this, I would appreciate it!). WhisperToMe (talk) 23:39, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Ninety miles away in the small Weld County farming community of Auburn, Duane Harms faced the same bitterly cold morning. The 23-year-old school bus driver, a slender man with reddish-blond hair and freckles, had tried college, but struggled. Now he had a job with School District No. 6, driving a bus in the morning and afternoon along a latticework of straight gravel roads. During the day, he worked as an elementary school janitor. He and his wife of 2 1/2 years, Judy, had a 3-week-old baby, Lynda, who had been born the day after Thanksgiving. Judy was a student at the state college in Greeley, working toward a teaching degree. She and Duane lived next to the old Auburn school in an 800-square-foot home originally built for the teacher. Five miles southeast of Greeley, the Auburn area had no general store, no post office. Simple frame houses stood along its straight, bumpy roads. Sugar beets, corn, alfalfa and pinto beans grew in its vast, flat fields. The families who lived there were first-, second- and third-generation immigrants — German-Russian, Swedish, Mexican — with names like Alles, Geisick, Munson, Brown, Rangel and Ford. They drove into Greeley, or to Platteville or Gilcrest, to worship. They went to Catholic, Baptist and Congregational churches. For three generations, children had taken their lessons in the Auburn school's classrooms, played ball out by the backstop. But the school was closed, and now, for the first time, the farm kids of Auburn rode a bus into Greeley. And another excerpt of text (which has a photo of the school in the source): Life as it had always been in the Auburn farming community hung there with him, its final seconds quickly slipping away. A 23-year-old with a newborn daughter, Harms had been content as a janitor at Delta Elementary outside Greeley. The work kept him busy, and it was only temporary, anyway, while his wife finished college and earned her teaching certificate. But his boss wanted him to drive the bus, and after days of wrangling he'd finally agreed to add that to his cleaning duties. The people of Auburn had been content, too, with their three-room country school, where generations of kids had learned to read and write and add and subtract. Many could walk to the blond-brick schoolhouse. Some rode their horses, tying them up out back between the old outhouses. But those times were gone. The Auburn school was shuttered. Now, the boys and girls stamped their feet and fidgeted against the brutally cold morning, farm kids on the edge of the road, waiting to board the bus. Girls wore print dresses and bundled up in wool coats and hand-knitted mittens and caps. Boys pulled rubber galoshes over their shoes. They carried their books — Learning To Use Arithmetic and Roads to Everywhere — under their arms with their three-ring binders. They clutched sack lunches. They were living on the cusp of tremendous change — in the country, in Colorado, in Auburn. John F. Kennedy — the youngest American president and the first born in the 20th century — was celebrating his first Christmas season in the White House. Just the night before, he and first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy attended a party for White House employees in the East Room. In Colorado, a wave of school district consolidations had swept the state. Less than two generations before, the state had more than 2,000 districts, many with only one building. By the mid-1950s, a legislative study had declared reorganization of Colorado's school districts the state's top educational priority. Between 1956 and 1961, nearly 700 had been eliminated. Only 275 remained. One victim was the Auburn district, about five miles southeast of Greeley. Little money but not poor The farm families of Auburn scratched out a life in the flat fields, sometimes working 20 hours a day, fixing whatever broke, sewing their own clothes, making do with what they had. Many rented their homes and land, and some farm workers lived in houses provided by their employers. They grew their own vegetables, butchered their own chickens. Most of them — children and grandchildren of German-Russian and Swedish immigrants who came to America with nothing — considered themselves fortunate. Art and Juanita Larson certainly did. She put in 28 or 29 days a month as a nurse's aide at Weld County General Hospital in Greeley. He drove a delivery truck six days a week. Their monthly income — $200 — allowed them to buy their 23-acre farm in Auburn in 1957. '''Clearly a former community. There are a good number of 1-, 2-, or 3-room rural schools that survive and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, partly as they were the core of a rural community like this. As NRHP listings they are documented and Wikipedia-notable. It probably is not necessary to have a separate article about the school and the community; one combo article is probably better. The school does not have to be NRHP-listed for the community to be notable; whether or not the school building still exists (not clear here) there should be a combo article because the community existed and was a populated place.''' --Doncram (talk) 17:15, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep. WhisperToMe's identified source establishes it was a community, centered about a school.  That is a populated place, a community, and notability is not temporary.  Excerpt from the source:
 * The Daniels School, currently a redlink, is an example of a schoolhouse in Weld County that survives and is NRHP-listed (and is asserted to be the only surviving brick rural schoolhouse in the county). It was used for multiple purposes in its community/area, as I am sure the Auburn School was too:  It was a center for ration book registration during World War II, it was a Junior Red Cross Unit, it was a meeting place for Boy Scouts and other groups, etc.


 * Other rural schools were used for dances and other community events. It is nice that the Daniels school is documented fully in an NRHP listing, which it could be from fact of its survival as a brick building, and the interest of a local historical society, but the Auburn community did also exist too. --Doncram (talk) 17:31, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Actually the Auburn School building still exists, at 40.37787°N, -104.63957°W, and is same as pictured in the document cited above. It would likely be NRHP-eligible if it were not modified too much, but has probably been renovated and is probably a private residence now, as best as I can figure from viewing it in Google Streetview.  It is extremely plausible that this school and its community could be documented as well as the Daniels one;  deleting Wikipedia coverage is not a helpful step. --Doncram (talk) 17:42, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
 * There is also this article (which I can't read, it wants me to pay to subscribe, as I am over the limit there) in Denver Post from 2007, about establishment of a bus crash memorial, relating to the 1961 incident covered in the article, the biggest loss of life in a vehicle in Colorado ever, apparently. The article properly covers the community, the school, the crash, and it could be expanded if anyone from Greeley historical society chooses to develop more, say.  Obvious keep, IMHO. --Doncram (talk) 17:54, 29 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Keep As per Doncram. BTW RX may help you obtain a copy of that article. WhisperToMe (talk) 18:38, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep - per Doncram. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:44, 30 March 2020 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.