(Editors note: This is the first in a series of stories investigating the decline in rural Kansas and efforts to reverse it.)
COURTLAND, Kansas Rural Kansas has a storied past, but decades of population decline stand poised to turn many once-vibrant places into ghost towns.
The struggle for survival reveals itself in emptied Main Streets, shuttered factories and tired-looking neighborhoods dominated by houses built before World War II.
An exodus that started more than 100 years ago and gained momentum during the Great Depression has now thinned the population of most of the states 105 counties to fewer than 10 people per square mile.
Quite a few counties peaked in the 1890 census in terms of total population and have never recovered, said Kansas historian Virgil Dean.
At 2%, Kansas population growth rate lags far behind the nations 6%. And its uneven. Most of it is concentrated in the states urban areas Kansas City, Wichita, Lawrence, Topeka and Manhattan. A forecast by researchers at Wichita State University projects growth in less than a fifth of the states counties over the next 50 years.
Still, Kansans fighting the trends cling to a different vision. They insist that population isnt the only measure of a livable community.
Rural Kansas is going to survive, said state Republican Rep. Ken Rahjes from Agra in north-central Kansas. We have that sense of pride in our communities. Were not going to let them die.
It will take more than defiance to save them, said journalist Corie Brown, a native Kansan whose career has taken her to newsrooms across the country. She recently returned to write a magazine article: Rural Kansas is dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why.
As Im driving around to these small towns, I realized theres no one here, he said.
Browns April 2018 article painted a stark picture of decline.
The small towns that epitomize Americas heartland are cut off from the rest of the world by miles and miles of grain, casualties of a vast commodity agriculture system that has less and less use for living, breathing farmers, Brown wrote.
Dramatic changes in agriculture hollowed out rural Kansas, Brown argues. Specifically, she blames the decades-long trend towards bigger farms that yield ever more abundant crops of wheat, corn and soybeans. Those bountiful harvests often dont return a breakeven price to farmers forced into debt to buy land and the sophisticated machinery needed to work more acres with fewer people.
That image abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape sums up the reality of rural Kansas, Brown wrote. It masks a harder truth: Kansass plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.
The move toward bigger farms run by fewer farmers along with other changes in the economy threatens the existence of towns that sprouted up to support larger family operations and to supply workers for railroads, mines and homegrown manufacturers.
