Auburn is a small college town in the Black Belt of Alabama, twenty-five miles from Tuskegee. The total population in 1890 was 1440; in 1900 it was 1447, of whom nearly 1000 are negroes. There are, roughly speaking, four classes of white families in the town: (1) the families of college professors, teachers, and preachers; (2) the families of merchants, real estate owners, well-to-do farmers, and of those who have moved in from the country to educate their children; (3) a large number of families who are more or less dependent for a livelihood upon taking boarders during the college session when there are about four hundred students in town; (4) several families of poorer people who rent land or have small farms near town, or clerk in stores, or do carpenter work. These last employ no negro servants, and are their own masters; while the first three classes are absolutely dependent upon the African for all servant's work.
The black population may be classified into (1) those who are industrious and fairly prosperous, who own their own homes or are able to rent good houses, who have regular occupations and who, as a rule, do not go out to service; (2) those who live by doing day work, cooking, nursing, washing, hauling, cutting wood, mowing lawns, working gardens, and other odd jobs; (3) those who do nothing at all until forced to work by hunger or cold; and (4) those who live on the outskirts of the town and work the greater part of the time on the farms near by, but who, in the summer and winter, may condescend to work as servants in town.