The empty heartland: job and population losses are hitting the dozen states of the rural Great Plains hard. But some towns are finding ways to fight back.

• Author: Egan, Timothy
• Position: National

When deal comes to a small town, the school is usually the last thing to go. A place can lose its bank, its tavern, its grocery store, its shoe shop. But when the school closes, you might as well put a fork in it.

So it was in Hardy, one of many last-gasp towns in Nuckolls County, Neb., along the Kansas state line. A stone marker, overgrown with weeds under sagging football goal-posts, marks where the Hardy school used to be.

Last year, Nuckolls County, population 4,843, lost another two schools to budget cuts and declining enrollment, perhaps dooming another pair of towns to Hardy's fate in a region that has seen nearly two thirds of its population disappear since 1920.

Those towns are not alone. From the Dakotas to the Texas Panhandle, the rural Great Plains has been losing people for 70 years, a slow demographic collapse. Once a vibrant swath of America with farmers and merchants doing business in bustling small towns, many rural countries are losing their very reason to exist, falling behind the test of the nation in nearly every category.

FADING OPTIMISM

Over the last half-century, when the United States added 130 million people and the population grew by 86 percent, rural countries in the 12 Great Plains states lost 21 percent of their people.

The vast region also appears to have lost some of the optimism that once seemed a part or rural American DNA. While many in the rural heartland embrace family and a way of life that puts less emphasis on material success, a University of Nebraska poll of 3,087 rural Nebraska residents found that only 11 percent said they were happy where they live--a major shift from earlier polls.

"Will this be the last generation to inhabit the rural Great Plains?" asks Jon Bailey of the Center for Rural Affairs, a nonprofit research group in Walthill, Neb. Few people in Nebraska, which has seven of the nation's 12 poorest counties, scoff at the question. (continued)

In counties near cities or interstate highways, population and jobs continue to grow, and overall, the population of the Great Plains states has increased. A few towns prosper because their leaders have found ways to attract new business, often through tourism (see "Sowing Art," p. 21).

But in the rural plains--about one sixth of the landmass of the United States--the wage gaps with cities are at record highs: People in rural counties of the Great Plains earn 48 percent of what their metro-area counterparts make, compared with 58 percent in 1990, according to one study. And in nearly 70 percent of the counties on the plains, there are fewer people now than there were in 1950.

CITY-STYLE PROBLEMS

The rural plains are now home to problems that America's industrial cities suffered in the 1960s. Among teenagers, drug use is higher in rural areas than in cities or suburbs, recent surveys indicate. The middle class is dwindling, leaving pockets of hard poverty.

In Superior, the Nuckolls County...