HUGO, Colo.—This agricultural outpost on eastern Colorado’s high plains is slowly vanishing—a fact of which Mayor Patsie Smith was painfully aware before the arrival of new Census data.
The 2010 Census shows Hugo lost 17 percent of its population—or 155 people—over the past decade. It now has just 730 residents. Surrounding Lincoln County also shrank by 10.19 percent, to just more than 5,000 people.
It is part of a trend seen in Colorado’s rural areas—the cowboy and railroad towns that once defined the American West but are now watching the next generation leave. Seventeen of the state’s 64 counties lost residents since 2000; several, like Lincoln, lost more than 10 percent of their populations.
“People are leaving for jobs,” said Smith, 63, as she pondered the tenacity of a town whose people look out for one another.
The prospect of gold and grazing land drew cattle ranchers and miners to the plains surrounding the Colorado Piedmont. Hugo was established in 1870 as a watering stop for the Kansas-Pacific railroad 85 miles southeast of Denver. Between 1910 and 1920, Hugo’s population expanded to 8,200 as the railroad and the cattle and grain industries prospered.
Since then, among other factors, small family farms have been bought out by corporations cashing in on dryland wheat. The cost of land and scarcity of water can make it impossible for small farmers to earn a living.
“Pretty soon it’s just not worth the fight,” said Hugo town manager Gary Ensign, 54.
Colorado grew by 16.9 percent since 2000. But five counties along the Kansas border—Sedgwick, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Prowers and Baca—each lost 10 percent or more of their populations during the 2000s. To the south, Huerfano and Mineral counties dropped by more than 10 percent.
“The reality is that it’s not a lack of 10-megabite Internet service that leads people to leave the country. It’s jobs, opportunity, coffee shops and bookstores—everything about living and working in a city,” said GOP state Sen. Greg Brophy, a corn and watermelon farmer from Yuma County who grew up on the Eastern Plains and has seen people leach away all his life.
Along Hugo’s main street of boarded-up windows and “closed” shop signs, Ensign sits down for lunch at Jean’s Family Kitchen, which he’s been patronizing for over 30 years. Customers at Jean’s clear their own tables and refill their neighbor’s iced tea when they notice the waitress struggling with the lunchtime rush.
Ensign attended the same high school his parents did, and he plans on staying here once he retires. He’s seen how most kids head to the city or to college after they graduate from Genoa-Hugo school.
Genoa, a nearby town of 139 residents, lost its only school because there were too few children to fill it. The school merged with Hugo in 1985.
“The community revolves around the school,” Ensign said. “It’s really sad, and I’ve seen it occur in a couple places in Lincoln County, where the community loses their school and they lose their soul.”
Today, the county’s largest employer is government. In 2000, the U.S. Census showed a small bump in county population after a state correctional facility was built south of Limon. The prison created about 300 jobs, but Garner said the population spike may have reflected the prison population.
“When they opened up that facility, everyone had to live within a 55-minute response time,” Smith said. “They did away with that. They’re not required to live by the facility where they work. And that has really hurt us—it cost us at least a hundred kids in the school.”
Even if new jobs could come to Hugo, Ensign said, its housing stock can’t support any influx. Most homes are dilapidated remnants of better times, and nicer ones immediately are snapped up on the rare occasions they go up for sale.
“There was a time where everybody chased smokestacks, and they tried to get a big company or some big enterprise to move in that would employ a lot of people,” Ensign said. “There are some restrictions here. We don’t have a work force.”
