South's rural towns shrink as economic troubles grow

By Larry Copeland
USA TODAY

GAINESVILLE, Ala. — This speck-on-the-map town, once Alabama's third largest, is home to fewer than 400 hardy souls. It has four tiny churches: Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian.

Through the years, so many people have left that members of different churches worship together so they can keep the congregations going. They call themselves "Methobapteriapalians." Says Maxine McClusky, a member of Gainesville Baptist and St. Albans Episcopal churches: "Sometimes on Sunday morning, it's just one or two of us and the preacher."

This is life in a vanishing place: Sumter County, Ala., one of the nation's fastest-shrinking counties. Since 2000, the population of the county, in west-central Alabama along the Mississippi border, has declined 10.1%, according to the Census Bureau. The drop follows decades of similar losses, a disheartening trend that is altering the way people live.

The USA's population history is most often a story of growth — of people moving to ever-growing metropolises and the challenges of accommodating them. The nation, which has one of the highest growth rates among industrialized countries, passed the 300 million mark in population almost two years ago and is expected to reach 400 million by 2040. But vast sections of the nation are seeing heavy, sustained population losses, a reflection of the decline of family farming and the lack of rural jobs and economic opportunities.

Some of the most drastic population decreases in the 20th century occurred in a wide swath of rural counties in the Great Plains, from the Canadian border to Texas.

Here in the Southeast, demographics have been dominated by dynamic growth: the New South economic engines of Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, N.C., and Nashville; the steady hustle of tourist magnets such as Charleston, S.C., and Jacksonville; and business expansion even in some smaller cities such as Smyrna, Tenn., Canton, Miss., and Lincoln, Ala., where automobile manufacturing plants have brought thousands of jobs — and new residents.

But there's another story here — about places that have seen their populations fall decade after decade. Sumter and most of the Southeast's other shrinking counties are in the so-called Black Belt, where vestiges of the Old South — de facto school segregation, poor race relations and entrenched poverty — are most prevalent. Rural towns in the Carolinas and Georgia, and especially in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, are hollowing out. More here.