MONOWI, Neb. — As the U.S. census cranks up from Key West to Nome, why does it really matter that a Nebraska town comprised of a tavern, a few crumbling houses, four street lamps and one drivable, dirt street be counted exactly right? Or even at all?
“Because I live in it,” said Elsie Eiler, who is Monowi’s entire population. Yet census estimates from this summer say there are two Monowians.
“Where’s this other person?” Eiler said. “Let me know. . . . I don’t want to come back to my house at 11 or 12 and see someone else there.”
Others across the country who live in the tiniest of tiny towns, from Indiana river country to the wind-swept Wyoming plains, feel the same way about census estimates.
They insist every person counts. So they want them counted right.
The census estimates there are four incorporated towns with just one person. But when contacted by The Associated Press, residents in three of those places say they aren’t the lonely souls the census says they are. The population of the fourth — Hoot Owl, Okla. — could not be verified by AP.
“Who’s that one?” said Thomas Saucier of Goss, Miss., one of the supposed one-person towns. “There’s 50 right here in Goss!”
Told that some estimates of the country’s most microscopic towns haven’t gone over too smoothly, an official of the federal count got a bit chapped herself.
“We’re doing the whole country,” said Barbara Vandervate of the Census Bureau. “If we could do one state a month, it’d be much easier to count everybody.”
And another thing: “If people don’t answer the questions, guess what? They don’t get counted.”
A resident of one of the supposedly one-person towns — New Amsterdam, Ind., listed that way in the 2000 census and in last summer’s bureau estimate — concedes that people there might have something to do with the statistical snafu. Mary Faye Shaffer cut the census little slack and said the town is bent on getting an accurate count this time around.
In the general store that she owns, Shaffer tallies residents of New Amsterdam until she reaches 19. But bring up the census, and her Southern accent hits some sharp notes.
“It’s embarrassing — ‘You live in a town with one person?’ ” Shaffer says people say to her. “People call here just because they think there’s only one person. You wouldn’t think the government would screw up this bad.”
Will this year’s counts straighten out such things? They aren’t holding their breath in Lost Springs, Wyo.
Population estimates from last summer repeated the finding of the the 2000 census: Pop. 1, as it says on the road sign entering town.
But Price says she has lived there 37 years and there has always been more than one person. The tally recently spiked 33 percent: A woman moved in with a man who has lived in Lost Springs for some time, increasing the population to four from three.
