This is inspired by my reading about a small farming town in N. Dakota. It started losing population in the 1980’s, and as the population dropped, taxes went way up. Eventually, there were not enough children to keep a school open-so the kids had to travel to another town (55 miles away). Then, local businesses shut down-eventually the town is left with a gas station and a post office. Finally, property values nosedive, and the only people left are the elderly and those who cannot move.
Has anyone experienced this? Is there anyway to reverse the death of such towns? Or is it a healthy thing? 
Dying town… hmn, that has a romantic ring to it. No, I don’t live in a dying town. Actually, this post is as good a place to brag about my hometown Maastricht as any. So, Maastricht, although it has alwyas been a small town, is over two thousand years old and still thriving. 
You might be interested in the story of the Dutch village of Schokland, though.
If you’ve ever seen the film ‘Brassed off’ you will know about what is happening to former mining communities here in Yorkshire - England.
There were many mines in Yorkshire, around where I live there were 8 or 9, and all have clsed down, officially for’economic reasons’ but actually this was a political shutdown in order to destroy the union power of the mineworkers.
These villages and small towns depending in part or in whole on the nearby pit, and coal was such an important national resource in the UK for a couple of centuries that it was impossible to set up any other industry of substance in many villages surrounding pits, the idea being to ensure there was an easily available workforce, the local authorities would never allow the planning permission to set up.
When the pits all shut down, these villages were simply marooned, with no nearby work, poor transport links as coal was shifted on goods train lines which were not viable passenger links, those who could moved away, leaving the elderly and indolent to either take drugs, or just to survive their last few years of life.
Some of these villages are being demolished bit by bit, many residents bought their houses from the coal board who previously owned them, but now the houses are almost worthless, which leaves those residents trapped.
There is often a gap toothed pattern of residence in a row of such terraced houses, where over half of them will be empty, save for the junkies and the tramps.
I can think of places such as Darfield, Grimethorpe, Cudworth, Hemsworth and the list goes on, tens of thousands employed in one industry turned jobless in less than a decade, along with all the smaller businesses that made their living providing equipment, services and entertainment to those working down the mines, for every job lost down the pit, three more were lost on the surface.
The result, an entire region is dying.
My own hometown started dying the day a WalMart opened fifteen miles away. Downtown has slowly been dying off since. We once had a downtown area full of 100+ year old, local family owned businesses. All the restaurants were little local places with great food. Now, there’s a couple fast food joints, a Chevron, and the 117 year old drugstore is being closed by its fourth generation owner, great grandson of the founder.
There’s not much left.
The town where I used to live is dying, like many of the towns in the area, as the little manufacturing concerns close up and are not replaced by anything. When the downtown drag is full of medical equipment stores and other businesses that cater to people over 70, you know the town is on the verge of collapse.
Not too long ago there was a Senate race where one candidate was unable to say that the area was in 10-year recession, becasue it would have been embarassing to his political sponsor, the governor. The other candidate said what was patently obvious, and then challenged the first candidate to take a position on the statement. And that, boys and girls, is how we got our first female president.
I might be soon. There’s been a lot of building going on around here the last few years, however the fishery (which is essentially the lifeblood of the area) has been down the last couple years. It’ll be interesting to see how things go from here, but I don’t plan to be around to see it.
My town has died. We have a post office (which we might be losing), a cafe, a park, a ball field and tennis court, two churches, a bar, a gas station, a phone company, a farm implement dealership, and a hairdresser. That might sound like a lot, but the cafe’s only open 4 hours a day and the bar closes at 10.
George Reeves was born here, and I was shocked when I watched the Biography channel show about his life. They had pictures of Woolstock at the time, and the town was positively bustling. We even had a men’s clothing store! Just men’s clothes!
But we’re a bedroom community (cheap rent and low taxes) for nearby towns, so there are no empty houses (except George’s place – the owner won’t sell it or let anyone live there). I don’t know the demographics, but it seems there’s a nice mix of retired folks and families with children.
I’m okay with living in a dead town. It’s quiet and we have all the basic services we need. Except a library. We could use a library.
It’s interesting, because I had ancestors from the Western part of Iowa, and I was once looking at an old fair program from the town where some of them lived. This was a small town, maybe just a tad bigger than Woolstock, and it was amazing the array of services they had – theaters, haberdashers, banks, restaurants, assembly halls, you name it. I guess before the era of the big chain store, everything was downtown – even if the town only had a thousand people. It’s weird to think of rural and small-town Midwest being so bustling a hundred years ago, compared with how it is today. But as casdave says, when the economic props are kicked out from under a region, decline is the only option left.
I travel to a small dying town once a month to our satellite office there. It is over an hour’s drive from the nearest small town, a five hour drive form the nearest small city (where I live). The only industry, a mine, has recently closed.
The townspeople are generally optimistic, and quite determined to see the town survive. While waiting and hoping that a new mine will open up (nothing in the works so far), the town is marketing itself as a retirement centre, in which folks from the south can sell off their expensive houses and move up north into very inexpensive houses, using the difference to provide for a nice lifestyle that includes lots of hunting and fishing.
As part of the marketing plan, the town is giving away a home: http://www.theecho.ca/echo/Default.aspx?PageName=Giveaway
I sincerely hope that the town survives. The people there have built a great community.
Not even a hundred years. The small town (pop. 3000) I grew up in, in the 50’s, had everything, including a corner drug store. Two jewelry stores, three shoe stores, several places to buy men’s and women’s clothing, a theater, lord knows how many taverns and hardware stores, etc.
When we left in 1967, things were still pretty good, but when we came back in 1990, the little towns were near death.
Chain stores killed the downtowns, but the rest of the decline (I think) is tied up with what happened in the 70’s, farmers over-extending themselves, buying high-priced land and equipment on credit, and then prices for grain and beef plummeted and many of them went broke.
In the country, used to be there were two or three farmsteads along every mile of road, with their 160 acres. Now there are stretches where you can drive for miles and see nothing but fields, and maybe a stand of trees around the empty space where a house once stood.
It’s sad as hell.
Does anyone know if there are any actual, recently-created ghost towns - where the truly last residents simply quit and moved away, with no purchaser for their property, or simply died off?
Well, there’s that creepy place with the coal fire under it and a couple people still living there, does that count? And of course the city near Chernobyl, that’s a true ghost town - if non-US examples count.
That would be Centralia, Pennsylvania. There are lots of eerie pictures on the Web of it, but even so, yes, there are still some folks for whom it’s home.
Come to think of it, any place with usable housing and no authority figures in the area may be likely to attract, well, let’s call them “casual residents” of some type, making the town not truly uninhabited.
Apparently this whole end of Pennsylvania is dying if one goes by population figures. From one year to the next, populations continue to slide. Declining enrollment is a factor for virtually all of our schools. All this is, of course, a result of the steel/coal industry collapse in the 70’s and 80’s.
There are many, many dying towns in rural Saskatchewan. The particular small town I grew up near is doing okay, as it’s just close enough to Saskatoon to attract a few residents as a bedroom community, but many small towns further from urban centres are vanishing as farmers move off the land because there’s no way to earn a living growing wheat anymore. The towns never served any purpose beyond providing services to the rural population, and while most of them fight for survival it’s almost always a losing battle.
I also bet increasing agricultural productivity played a role. I imagine one farmer today with a high-end combine can do the work of a dozen or more people of a couple generations ago. Add in improved seed, pest management, etc.
Still, it’s amazing to think of the change. Three shoe stores, for example! I live in a town of 75,000 people, and I think it doesn’t have a single store that just sells shoes. Of course, there’s Target.
There are a few abandoned towns around here. Some are just “camp” towns, where people lived to work at nearby plants. One town was bought by a chemical company that contaminated the town, they just bought it (and a nearby camp) and demolished it. Some little towns just aren’t there anymore. I remember when I was a kid, my dad took us to one of the old towns. The high school gym was still there, and there were old roller skates all over the place. One of the little dying towns recently had a giveaway, gave 5 lots in town away for free. No takers.
My mom and aunt inherited my grandparents’ farmland, and my great-uncle’s son basically does the farming, etc. for their land and his own (and some other relatives’). And it will all be sold off instead of the next generation inheriting. Even with co-ops of individual farmers, economies of scale simply give corporate farms too much of an economic advantage.
My grandparents lived in Kenesaw NE, which is a tiny farming town that is much, much reduced from what my mom and aunt describe it as from 40-50 years ago. There are a lot of tiny townships in that part of Nebraska that are the same.
A lot of towns in my area are dying. Most of these little towns in Western NY are here because of the Erie Canal, but it’s not like the Canal is doing a lot of business anymore, so a lot of the businesses around it have started closing up. It’s sad, but it probably is healthy in the end.
The town I grew up in was (and maybe still is) dying. When I was growing up, the population was in the 700s. Now it’s gone down into the 600s. They do still have a post office, grocery store, a nice new bank, a couple of gas stations, and a nice specialty/hardware store. The high school closed six years ago, but there is still a K-8. There’s also a charter school now, which serves around 40 kids. There’s really no industry to speak of. However, they’ve got a new housing addition going in with a golf course. I hope it helps boost things over there.
The town I currently live in I think was dying at some point too. What’s saved us here is Hmong immigrants. They’re buying up the housing and filling our schools with kids. In the last census, our population actually went up by a couple of hundred, which is great, and unlike most schools in the area, our enrollment has held pretty steady. There are still some racist jerks, of course, who do not like these immigrants, but I think most people, like me, see the benefit in having them here. They’re nice families and their kids do extremely well in school and activities. My town has a library, post office, implement dealership, half a dozen eating establishments (only a couple of chains - Subway and DQ - the rest are mom and pop), grocery store, Asian grocery, a small car dealership (small dealership, not small cars), newspaper/publishing company, coffee shop w/ gifts, lighting/gift store, furniture store, variety store, another specialty/gift shop, two greenhouses, a couple insurance agencies, and a few gas stations and service stations. I think that’s it. We also have a new aquatic center that’s really nice. When I moved here five years ago, downtown looked pretty bleak. We’ve gotten probably four or five new businesses since then.