MAXWELL, Neb.—Basic supplies have been in short supply here since Story’s Hardware closed more than 20 years ago. Even something as basic as a haircut requires a 16-mile trip to North Platte.
The so called “Good Life” of wide-open spaces, small-town living and friendly people long trumpeted in the state’s tourism ads still rings true here and across the state. But new statistics show that by at least one measure, the dwindling populations in the rural areas of Nebraska may have hit a new low.
The estimated median size of Nebraska towns—320, which is about the population of Maxwell—may be the lowest ever.
And the smallest towns will disappear “if not in a literal sense, then a figurative sense” because of dwindling services and population, said David Drozd, of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Public Affairs Research.
“Activity-wise, it’s really limited here,” said 17-year-old Maxwell resident Charles Scheutt while standing near the town’s mostly empty main drag.
Drozd used recent population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate the estimated statewide median, or the population midpoint of all towns in the state.
The Associated Press then compared the estimated median of 320 to median town sizes stretching back to 1890.
“From a policy perspective, the question becomes, ‘Do you want to keep these towns active? Do you want to try to save these small towns, or do you let them go by the wayside?'” said Drozd.
After peaking at 435 in 1920, Nebraska’s median town population dropped throughout much of the 20th century. It spiked upward in 1980 to 372 and dropped again in 1990. There was a slight increase in 2000, possibly caused by the large immigration of Hispanics into the state during the 1990s.
The drop in the estimated median size of towns statewide is a result of “the very small places getting smaller,” said Randy Cantrell, a rural sociologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The low median figure is also another sign to Cantrell that some of the most rural areas outside of Lincoln and Omaha, where about 40 percent of the state’s roughly 1.8 million residents live, may be slipping toward what he calls a “frontier economy.”
Such an economy is filled with workers who have unreliable employment and often work for themselves, doing whatever work is available—painting a neighbor’s barn one week, for example, and doing construction work the next—rather than steady, long-term employment.
Cantrell recently studied the prevalence of self-employment not including farm ownership and found that it was becoming a bigger piece of the rural job pie. At the same time, the number of farm operators and jobs where people work for a regular wage or salary became a smaller piece since 1997.
The trend was most pronounced in the most rural areas of the state that in many cases are struggling the most to maintain their populations.
Self-employment is often viewed as a sure sign of entrepreneurial activity, but Cantrell’s study suggested that interpretation can be wrong in many cases. He found that while self-employment off the farm is growing more quickly than regular wage and salary jobs, the same can’t be said for the earnings of such jobs.
In the state’s most rural counties, the average earnings of self-employed people who didn’t own farms actually declined—from 62 percent of the average earnings of people with wage and salary jobs in 1997, to 34 percent in 2006.
“If you see an out-migration driven by accelerating economic decline—which is possible—then what you may be having is people staying in these areas just because they don’t want to leave and having to piece together work,” Cantrell said.
Economic decline seems apparent in Maxwell’s mostly bare business district. But there are signs of hope.
In Maxwell, the population has remained fairly steady and actually increased some in recent years as it has become more of a bedroom community to nearby North Platte, which is just a 15-minute drive west on nearby Interstate 80.
Also, enrollment at the local K-12 school is the highest in recent memory, booming because it has become a magnet for people in North Platte and other areas outside the Maxwell school district who want their children in a small-town school. There is a waiting list of kids to get into four grades at the school, and “at the last three home football games last year there were over 1,000 people” at each one, Maxwell Principal Aub Boucher said proudly.
And after decades without a grocery store, one recently opened downtown.
Owner Traci Picotte said she opened the store believing that high gas prices might encourage people to buy some groceries in Maxwell instead of driving to North Platte, and that the theory seems to be panning out.
Standing in her store on Main Street, where an auto body shop is the only other business, Picotte said, “Each day seems to be getting better.”
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