Auburndale, WI

Auburndale is a Wood County village whose first big change arrived with the Soo Line Railroad in 1871. William St. Thomas began clearing land that year, John and Robert Conner built a cabin and laid out a village, and the railroad opened the door to lumbering, a shingle mill, and a sawmill. Auburndale was platted in 1877 and incorporated in 1881, with its first school already in place by 1873. The sequence gives the village its basic shape: a rail-and-timber beginning, then a settled crossroads for north-central Wood County.

The town has had a couple of hard resets. A late-1880s cyclone badly damaged the village, and a 1906 fire started by a passing locomotive burned the timber supply and changed the business character. Today Auburndale is mainly residential, with rural service and trade facilities for the surrounding area. The old lumber story still matters because it puts the railroad-era start in context, while the village's present-day role is closer to a small home base for the farms and communities around Marshfield, Wisconsin Rapids, and Stevens Point.