History > 2006 > USA > Towns, Cities

Sheriff Billy Burt Hopper

patrols Loving County, in West Texas,

in a pickup truck with two shotguns and an AK-47.

David Bowser for The New York Times

February 24, 2006

  1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America's Emptiest County

NYT

25.2.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/national/25loving.html

In Georgia County,

Divisions of North and South

Play Out in Drives to Form New Cities

July 13, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, July 12 — The board of commissioners in Fulton County has a rather dry term for the revolt that is under way here: municipalization. Everyone else calls it secession.

Except this time around, the north started it.

It began last year when Sandy Springs, a largely white, wealthy community north of Atlanta, chose to incorporate as a city so that it would no longer be under the control of county government, which is dominated 4 to 3 by black Democrats. Now that action has led other unincorporated areas of the county to consider becoming cities, and the movement includes even the county’s poorest areas.

Four referendums on incorporation are planned for the next year. Their passage would change the face of one of the nation’s most populous counties, leaving it with no unincorporated areas and a budget tens of millions of dollars smaller.

The county may no longer provide police, fire and road maintenance to the 140,000 of its 900,000 residents who now live in unincorporated areas. Sandy Springs, viewed by incorporation advocates as a model, has contracted out most of its functions in what experts say is the most extensive experiment to date in municipal privatization.

Fulton County is long and ungainly, more than 70 miles from tip to tip. Atlanta occupies the middle section, leaving the north and south geographically separate, as well as demographically distinct. The area north of Atlanta is whiter, wealthier and more developed; the southern section has far more blacks and undeveloped land.

When this fight started more than three decades ago, critics said it was racist at heart. Sandy Springs, a white-flight suburb that has since become more diverse, harbored a growing resentment over what its residents saw as a disproportionately small return on the taxes they paid — taxes that helped subsidize police and fire services in south Fulton County. When Sandy Springs incorporated last Dec. 1, after a near-unanimous vote, it took with it $70 million in tax revenues that would otherwise have gone to the county.

Accusations of racism and dysfunctional government linger. But now that even the south is weighing the benefits of incorporation, the bitterness has subsided into a relatively calm discussion of growth and sprawl, traffic and land use. And the view is spreading that both sides could benefit — even the poorer cities would control their own zoning and roads, and the county would get out of the business of providing municipal services and return to its mandate in the State Constitution: health and human services, the justice system and libraries.

“We go back to doing what we constitutionally were supposed to do,” said Commissioner William Edwards, who represents south Fulton County. “Now our 10-hour meeting goes to a 2-hour meeting.

In the fast-growing northern section of Fulton County, leaders have long advocated incorporation or even becoming a separate county, echoing separatist movements that have divided parts of California and other fast-growing areas. But their demands went nowhere until last year, when Republicans took over the both houses of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction and permitted Sandy Springs to vote on incorporation.

Since then, the legislature has approved similar referendums in Johns Creek and Milton in the north, to be held on Tuesday, and in South Fulton and Chattahoochee Hill Country in the south, which will vote next year. Analysts have said all four cities would be financially viable, but some officials point out that the creation of another layer of government runs counter to conservative principles and predict that taxes will rise.

“How many jails are you going to build?” asked Commissioner Nancy A. Boxill. “How many court systems are you going to have?”

All the new cities would be untraditional. Johns Creek, for example, is an amalgam of subdivisions and golf clubs, with little retail business and nothing resembling a town center. The smallest of the four, Chattahoochee Hill Country, would have 40,000 acres and 3,000 people. Its development plans call for hamlets amid open space.

The county government has long had trouble keeping up with a growth rate that is about twice the national average. The tax assessors’ office was recently discovered to be in utter disarray, and its entire board of assessors replaced. The county jail has been under the control of a court-appointed monitor to prevent overcrowding. Security in the county courts was so bad that last year a prisoner escaped, stole a deputy’s gun and killed a judge and two other people before fleeing.

In Johns Creek, residents point to the Robert E. Fulton Library, named for a former commissioner, as evidence of the county’s disregard for the interests of the largely white area. Until the late 1990’s, just 3 of the county’s 30 libraries were in north Fulton County. Residents complained of 45-minute drives to browse sparse bookshelves or use slow, outdated computers.

When Commissioner Fulton (whose name only coincidentally matched the county’s), managed to find land to build a 25,000 square foot library for his constituents in the north, the board allocated money to furnish only 18,000 square feet. Still, last year that library and two others in north Fulton County had the highest circulation in the county.

But the south county commissioners are unapologetic. While north Fulton County might have fewer libraries, Commissioner Edwards said, south county libraries are “telephone booths with books in them.”

“You go up north,” he said, “and they got all the bells and whistles.”

On a recent night Mike Bodker, a businessman who is spearheading the drive for incorporation in Johns Creek, appeared at the Robert E. Fulton Library to answer questions at a homeowners meeting.

Mr. Bodker criticized the county board as failing to improve intersections or fill potholes, for spot zoning decisions like one permitting a dentist to build an office in a residential neighborhood, and for what he called shoddy maintenance of parks.

“And on top of that,” he added afterward, “they hate us.”

Mr. Bodker said it was not the mere fact that the north subsidized the south that grated on him, but the degree to which the commissioners took the money for granted. “There were many points in time when Fulton County could have stopped this from happening,” he said. “To do so, they would have had to listen.”

County officials acknowledge that Sandy Springs paid, and Johns Creek still pays, far more for services than they receive. But Robert J. Eger III, an expert in municipal finance at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, said that a view of the north as a donor community did not hold up historically.

“You would have to look at who paid for north Fulton to become as developed as it did,” Mr. Eger said.

The north and south were separate counties, Milton and Campbell, until 1932, when Fulton agreed to absorb them to save them from bankruptcy.

Some people say Sandy Springs, Johns Creek and Milton may come to regret their eagerness to go their own way. While the north has become saturated, the south has plenty of room for growth. In fact, recent financial reports showed that the south’s property value had been underestimated by more than $1 billion, said Patrick O’Connor, the county’s director of finance, in part because the tax assessors had been behind in recording deeds, but also partly because growth projections were exceeded.

That tickles Commissioner Edwards, who says it is the south that has been the county’s stepchild for too long.

“There’s no more room to grow up north,” he said. “There’s nothing to do up there. So now, the south is becoming the cash cow.”

    In Georgia County, Divisions of North and South Play Out in Drives to Form New Cities, NYT, 13.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/us/13secede.html

Company Town, Losing a Landlord, Seeks a Mate

July 6, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SCOTIA, Calif. — There are three flags that fly over Main Street in this quainter-than-quaint town on the banks of the Eel River.

The first two are easy: the flags of the United States and California. But the third is probably unknown to anyone without a working knowledge of the lumber industry, the spotted owl or the old logging camps of the Pacific Northwest.

It is the flag of the Pacific Lumber Company, which, as it happens, has owned the entirety of Scotia, all 500 acres of it, for 140 years: its homes, its streets, its shops and even its two churches.

Until now, that is. Late last year, bowing to economic realities and requests from employees, Pacific Lumber announced that it would sell almost all of its residential holdings in Scotia — 275 houses — to the employees who rent them, effectively putting an end to one of the last company towns in America.

The deal, of course, comes with a catch.

While this lovely little town has one of everything — a single supermarket, a single restaurant, and a single doctor — what is more notable is what it lacks. There is no city council, no mayor, no governing structure whatsoever. As the only landlord in town, Pacific Lumber provides the town's security, sewage treatment, water, power, maintenance, and, in the winter, free firewood.

All of that will end, however, when Pacific Lumber sells, which could begin as soon as next year. And that is where the town across the river comes in.

One of the leading plans being debated is for the city of Rio Dell (pop. 3,174), to annex Scotia, a plan backed by Pacific Lumber.

It is easy to see the appeal for Rio Dell, which sits across a small green bridge from Scotia. Nestled into a wooded hillside off Highway 101, about 250 miles north of San Francisco, Scotia is both immaculate and surreal, equal parts Mayberry and Twin Peaks. Rows of perfect little houses sit on perfect little lawns, almost identical right down to the paint, which is limited, by a company rule, to pale greens, yellows, browns and blues. (The company president's wife picked out the colors.) Ducks and geese sleep in front yards, and children play safely in the sleepy streets.

The town also has assets, most of which may also be sold by Pacific Lumber. The main street has a movie theater, a museum and the Scotia Inn, a 1920's hotel that houses the town's only restaurant and bar. (It is currently closed for renovations.) Scotia has a new shopping center, a school for kindergarten through eighth grade, a community recreation center and a baseball diamond, all within walking distance of the giant lumber mill and power plant that hulk and hum next to the river.

And as all residents of Scotia, population 800, must be employees of or consultants for the company or work in the town's businesses, the populace has another enviable attribute: almost everyone, except retirees, has a job.

"I live exactly 47 paces from the firehouse," said John Broadstock, the volunteer fire chief for Scotia and the chief of plant security for Pacific Lumber. "Or 22 when the alarm goes off."

Still, while the annexation plan is backed by most residents of the two towns, there is also anxiety, as with any arranged marriage.

For the townspeople of Scotia — which, on its surface, has more in common with the 19th century than the 21st — there is the worry that some of the modern problems of Rio Dell might migrate to their town. Rio Dell, which was hit hard by a recent slump in the lumber industry, ranks well below national averages in household income, property value and educational level. The unemployment rate for Humboldt County, the tree-rich region where Scotia and Rio Dell sit, is above California state averages.

"This area has always been somewhat dependent on the lumber industry," said Graham Hill, who is both the acting city manager and the police chief for Rio Dell. "And when they downsized, that really had an economic effect on this area."

Indeed, while downtown Scotia looks like something out of "Brigadoon," Rio Dell's main drag is a little more rough around the edges, with gas stations and inexpensive restaurants and even a homeless person or two. And while Scotia has almost no serious crime, Rio Dell keeps its police officers — all six of them — busy with about 3,200 calls a year, Mr. Hill said.

Dan Dill, a Scotia resident and fifth-generation Pacific Lumber employee, said he was aware of the problems across the Eel River, but thought the deal was still a good idea. "I'm not too worried," said Mr. Dill, 35. "They've definitely had some rocky times, but I think they're really improving now."

For their part, some residents of Rio Dell also have questions about taking on new responsibilities. "Everyone that I've ever heard anything from seems to have a positive attitude about it, with the caveat that 'You're looking into this, right?' " Mr. Hill said. "Because we're dealing with a big company with a lot of resources."

As that suggests, Pacific Lumber would like Rio Dell to take on Scotia, which costs the company more than $1 million a year to maintain. The company is footing the bill for two studies looking at the infrastructure of the town and the economic impact of the proposed annexation.

Kirk Gothier, a planning director who sits on the county commission, which is in charge of approving the deal, said the studies were necessary "to assure Rio Dell they are not inheriting a can of worms" in annexing Scotia.

"While the town looks nice, the infrastructure is not as nice," Mr. Gothier said. "It's tough to keep up the streets with lumber trucks running around."

Scotia is also old. The founders of Pacific Lumber bought the property the town sits on in 1863 and built the first bunkhouse two decades later. Originally called Forestville, the town was renamed Scotia in 1888, by which time it had a post office, a church and its own school district.

At the time, it was just one of hundreds of company-owned settlements nationwide, said Linda Carlson, author of "Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest," who said the Western towns were driven by logging and mining and largely killed off by the Great Depression and commuting. During the Depression, most operations closed for at least a few years, Ms. Carlson said, adding, "and by the time they came back, the people were gone."

But Scotia survived the Depression, as well as periodic fires, floods and environmental battles, which put new pressures on loggers to protect the natural habitats of endangered animals like the spotted owl and the coho salmon. After years of protests, in 1999, Pacific Lumber signed a landmark habitat conservation deal, the Headwaters agreement, which protected thousands of acres of ancient redwoods and squeezed the extent of logging operations.

Pacific Lumber has also in recent years closed two local mills — in Fortuna and Carlotta, Calif. — as well as one mill in Scotia. Like the town of Scotia, the Fortuna and Carlotta mills are being considered for sale and development, while a brewery is considering moving into the shuttered Scotia mill.

The lumber company is owned by Maxxam, a Houston corporation, which posted a net loss of $10.2 million in the first quarter of 2006. Nonetheless, Robert E. Manne, the president of Pacific Lumber, said his main motivation in selling the town was keeping employees happy by making them homeowners, though he admitted that "obviously, when we exit this and sell the homes, we get the money."

Mr. Manne said the company was doing everything it could to protect the town's special character.

"But when it comes down to the nostalgia, in the mind of the employee, and the choice between history and them being able to have an affordable house and being able to meet the American dream?" Mr. Manne said. "The American dream wins."

Still, some town residents said they would miss knowing all their neighbors, not to mention the free firewood. "Sure, everybody holds a little bit of that," said Mr. Broadstock, the fire chief. "But we're in totally different times now. Things have got to change to survive."

    Company Town, Losing a Landlord, Seeks a Mate, NYT, 6.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/us/06scotia.html?hp&ex=1152244800&en=12f23f148ac37379&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Not Far From Forsaken

April 9, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD RUBIN

It is as you imagine it: Vast. Open. Windy. Stark. Mostly flat. All but treeless. Above all, profoundly underpopulated, so much so that you might, at times, suspect it is actually unpopulated. It is not. But it is heading there.

In our national consciousness, America is a land of perpetual growth. But for the past half-century or more, much of the middle of the country has been slowly, quietly emptying out. A few people left, then more and more, until it started to resemble an organized exodus. For a while, it looked as if the area might indeed one day resemble the Great American Desert it was mistakenly labeled on early maps.

That didn't happen. At some point, throughout middle America, the population hemorrhage stopped, bottomed out.

But not here, in North Dakota. North Dakota has continued to lose people. And it didn't have that many to begin with. In 1930, its population peaked at 680,845. In 2000, it was down to 642,200, and by 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, it had dropped to 634,366. (By comparison, the national population more than doubled, to 294 million from 123 million, during the same period.) Of the 25 counties nationwide that lost the largest portions of their populations in the 1990's, 12 were in North Dakota.

Statistics are ethereal. For tangibles, all you have to do is drive the long, straight roads in the northwestern part of the state, the ones that run roughly parallel to the old railroad tracks and the Canadian border: Highway 5, Highway 50, U.S. 2. You won't pass many cars; depending upon where you're driving, and when, you may not pass any at all for a half-hour or more. What you will pass, in no small numbers, are the things left behind in the exodus: Abandoned houses. Empty stores. Churches without congregations. Community buildings gone dark. Closed schools, never to reopen.

Wry North Dakotans have suggested that such sights are now so common that they should perhaps be represented in the state seal. All of them, that is, except for the schools. No one jokes about those. Empty houses and stores and community halls and even churches are signs of a fading past; empty schools are signs of a fading future.

But even as the American small town continues what often seems like an irresistible decline, some in northwest North Dakota are mounting a resistance, an organized effort to draw people — new people, young people, families — to their small towns. And a few have taken things even further by reviving, in a fashion, the very institution that generated them in the first place: homesteading.




In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act, which ultimately gave away 270 million acres of American land, one 160-acre parcel, or "quarter section," at a time, to virtually anyone who agreed to build a permanent dwelling on it and spend at least five years living there and otherwise "improving" it. The act took effect at midnight on Jan. 1, 1863; the first claim was filed a few minutes later. But it would be another 40 years before people started homesteading in earnest in northwest North Dakota. When they did, the greatest number of them came from Norway, where, folks like to say, the soil was also frozen and the neighbors were also distant. This is true, but that didn't make homesteading any easier, not here. People, a lot of them, froze to death or starved or died of some ailment en route to the nearest doctor, who was often a day's ride away or more. A lot more perceived at some point that their choices came down to leaving or dying. They chose to live and left. The majority of those who filed claims did not last long enough to "prove up" those claims.

But some did. They stayed, they farmed, they married and started families and subsisted, and some of them even thrived. Towns sprang up, their locations usually chosen by the railroads, which sometimes chose their names too. People opened shops. They built churches and schools and, often, good community-oriented Scandinavians that they were, music halls and dance halls and fellowship halls and opera houses.

In 1862, when the Homestead Act was passed, a quarter section was considered to be about as much land as a farmer could be reasonably expected to work alone, given the state of technology. It wasn't easy, but people managed to live off that quarter section. Farmers grew wheat as a cash crop and raised chickens and cows and hogs to feed themselves. Loyd Olin, a farmer who is now 90 and lives in Crosby, N.D., can recall a time when "there was someone here on every quarter" — that is, when every quarter section in the area had a different family living on it and off it. He was one of them, raised on land homesteaded by his parents. The years of his youth, the 1920's, are seen today as North Dakota's golden era, a time when towns grew and prospered, when the opera houses actually had operas and the dance halls were packed on Saturday nights, when the schools were full of children and every town had an amateur baseball league and when a lot of them had movie houses and newspapers and doctors and dentists and when the bigger ones like Crosby, the seat of Divide County, had several groceries and mercantile stores, several car dealerships and farm-implement dealerships and banks and several competing grain elevators.

Then came what Olin calls the "dry years," the decade commonly known here as the Dirty 30's. The drought that produced the Dust Bowl farther south hit North Dakota too, and many farmers who survived the first hard years of homesteading could no longer hang on. "That's when so many people left here," Olin says. "You could buy a quarter of land for six, seven hundred dollars. But there was no banks to borrow money from."

Those who could somehow get the money bought the quarters their neighbors gave up on, consolidating them into much larger farms that, with more modern technology, could be worked in the same time, at the same cost, as a much smaller farm. Producing a larger crop at a lower cost, they were able to sell it for less and thus drive down prices for everyone else. Eventually, it became impossible for a farmer to survive on a quarter section. Those who couldn't expand left; those who stayed bought up the abandoned acres and enlarged their own farms further, forcing prices even lower. As the cycle continued, the population plummeted. In 1930, the population of Divide County was 9,636. By 2004, it had fallen to 2,208, a decline of 77 percent.

That was when David Olson, Divide County's director of economic development, hit upon an idea that he hoped might reverse that trend before it was too late. Olson discovered that the town had assumed ownership of five housing lots for back taxes; what if, he thought, instead of selling them at auction, the town of Crosby gave the lots away to people who would move there, build houses on them and stay a while, maybe longer? Not as a bribe, really, or even much of a financial incentive, since the lots were not worth much, but rather, as Olson explains, "more of a nice gesture, to welcome people." Yet something else was already going on in the area, and it soon infused those five little nice gestures with a mission: to entice young people from other parts of the country to pick up and move to northwest North Dakota, settle down, start families and fill those empty schools again.




In 2002, a few businessmen and civic boosters got together and founded the Northwest North Dakota Marketing Alliance. It was formed in the belief that the region — with the exceptions of Minot, the state's fourth-largest city and home to a major Air Force base, and Williston, a town of about 12,000 — was in danger of someday emptying out entirely and that the best way to prevent that would be to attract young men and women from other parts of the country, young men and women who would fall in love with the land and the people and the lifestyle and put down roots here and create a new generation, and future generations, of northwest North Dakotans.

For the first year or so, that idea was about all they had. Then in 2003 Steve Slocum joined the effort. Slocum, who is 52, was born in Montana but grew up in Williston and is as fervent and tireless an ambassador for North Dakota as you are likely to meet. Marketing is Slocum's game — he works as a marketing director for a local bank in Williston — and he felt he had a great product to sell. People who see northwest North Dakota for the first time, he says, "are blown away by the average-guy-on-the-street hospitality." The product, he says, "is the people — it's the sense of community."

Bernie Arcand, who is 58 and works for a telecom company in Ray, N.D., a town of about 500 some 35 miles northeast of Williston, agrees. North Dakotans, he says, are "superfriendly, to where you say they're borderline nosy. A real tight sense of community." And even though he says so in his capacity as secretary of the Marketing Alliance — an unpaid position, like every other one in the organization — you need only spend a day or two in the area to see that he may, in fact, be understating the case. While there is no scientific apparatus for measuring such a thing, northwest North Dakotans might just be the friendliest people in America. It is rare, very rare, to pass someone on the road without receiving at least a finger wave, regardless of whether or not they have ever seen you or your car before. A stranger walking down the street of a small town will not only be smiled at but also approached and actually engaged in genuine conversation. And a stranger stopping into a small-town bar will be hailed instantly as an honored guest, even after he explains that he only came in to use the restroom.

So why would anyone ever leave? "It's a great place to raise your kids," Arcand says. "But once the kids are graduated from college, there are no dang jobs for them." And the prospects of attracting large companies, the kind that might create a few hundred jobs and help lure those kids back home, are, he says, pretty poor, for a reason that should otherwise be a point of great pride. "Our unemployment rate is so low" — 3.4 percent statewide, among the lowest in the nation — "if I were a businessman, I'd be reluctant to invest millions in a company here, knowing that there's no one to hire here."

This, then, is the problem: you have a great place with a lot to offer — clean air, good neighbors, low cost of living, very little crime, great pheasant hunting, etc. — but no jobs. How, then, do you get someone to move there? And not just any someone — not, for instance, only retirees, some of whom, drawn by those same selling points, have already come. How do you attract the folks you really want, young people who will start families?

If you view it that way — that is, as a problem of long-distance, special-circumstance matchmaking — the most logical place to turn is the Internet. And so in 2003 Slocum helped create PrairieOpportunity.com, a new kind of online personal — State Seeks Residents.

"Do you have what it takes to be a 21st-century pioneer?" the home page asks. "Odds are," it continues, "you are not a candidate for NW North Dakota. You have succumbed to the cities. All of your pleasure must be provided, and you gladly stand in long lines to receive them. But if you are one of those who is wondering what they are doing in that line, continue on." That page links to another, titled "What It Takes," which is really just a list of selling points like "We have front doors that are usually locked only at night or while on vacation" and "We have businesses that know your first name and use it" and "We have milk cartons without pictures of children." But, as another page warns: "This is a very tough and unforgiving country to be waltzin' in because you are fed up with traffic. . .you need to make sure you can pay your bills without relying on NW North Dakota to provide you with an income. We have very low unemployment, and the folks up here expect everybody to pull their own weight. To support this philosophy, our convenience stores have the little penny bowls by their tills with a small sign by them reading: 'If you need a penny, help yourself. If you need two pennies, get a job."'

The Web site lists 86 eligible towns and communities in northwest North Dakota, though by its own accounting nearly half of them are either unincorporated or ghost towns. Visitors to the site are invited to fill out and submit a questionnaire. Slocum says the site typically attracts about 20 "good" e-mail inquiries a week.




It is tough to say, exactly, how many families have actually picked up and moved to northwest North Dakota since all this began. There are no statistics, only anecdotes, and very few of those. Steve Slocum can list a few families, but even he gets a little fuzzy on whether all of them have actually moved to the area or merely intend to at some point. One thing he can tell you, though, with certainty and pride: a family from out West has moved to and is starting a business up in Crosby, the town where they're giving away the free land. What's more, that family, the Oehlkes, didn't even take advantage of that offer. That, they will tell you, is not why they came.

Shawn Oehlke is 44 and grew up outside Chicago; his wife, Esther, is 46 and hails from Long Island. After a stint working for Boeing in Albuquerque, Shawn, an Air Force veteran with a technical background, decided to strike out on his own someplace where the costs of living and doing business would be much lower, the lifestyle much less frenetic. Esther stumbled upon PrairieOpportunity.com, and after a few phone calls, the Oehlkes decided to visit. They had planned to look at four small towns; Crosby, with about 1,050 residents, was by far the largest. They went there first and liked it so much they never bothered with the other three.

The Oehlkes shared their plans with Olson and Divide County's Economic Development Council: they were going to start a company, SEO Precision, that would design and build electro-optic mechanisms, primarily for military applications. The E.D.C. was thrilled, acquired a 16,000-square-foot building in the middle of town — an old J.C. Penney, built in 1917 — so they could to lease it to the Oehlkes and, as Esther recalls, said all the right things. "We were told, point-blank, by one of the town leaders, 'We have three banks and all the money you need."' They were, she says, "very persuasive."

And so in August 2004 the Oehlkes packed up and moved, with their two school-age sons, from New Mexico to North Dakota. They turned the old department store's massive basement into Shawn's lab and workshop and assumed management of the rest of the building. The ground floor now has a community room with a television, a kitchen and wi-fi, a tech center where locals can take computer classes and commercial space that houses a clothing boutique, a tanning salon and a coffee bar. The second floor has eight apartments, only two of which were already rented out — one of them by David Olson, who is 30 and a bachelor — when the Oehlkes arrived; they rented out the others within a month and lived in one themselves until they bought a house on the edge of town. None of this may sound particularly revolutionary, but the Oehlkes are pioneers no less than the old homesteaders, and they know it. "What we're realizing," Esther says, "is we're probably the only ones from out of state who've come here to try and prove the experiment."

How that experiment is turning out is a matter of some dispute. Throughout northwest North Dakota, folks with ties to the marketing alliance cite the Oehlkes as a great success story, even though most have never met them. The Oehlkes, however, have their doubts. Sometimes, in fact, they feel downright frustrated. The banks, they say, have not come through with all the loans they promised and are, the Oehlkes perceive, holding them to much more rigorous standards than they apply to natives; town and county committees that were supposed to approve tax credits and variances have dithered or, worse, failed to meet at all. By last November, Esther was so discouraged that she wrote an open letter to the town that was published in The Journal, Crosby's weekly newspaper. "Is Crosby's existence important?" she asked. "Are you interested in seeing it survive and grow? We heard that North Dakota wanted small businesses, and to attract their young people back to the local towns.. . .So we believed you." She lamented: "We're happy to be here, but some of you, even those of you in decision-making positions that affect the future of the town, aren't happy we're here.. . .Meetings put off, lack of vision in planning ahead, burdensome regulations that are used arbitrarily, counting cost instead of counting value — these are why businesses and people leave this town."

Steve Andrist, the publisher of The Journal, finds himself caught in the middle of the debate. "I'm acutely aware that there are people who are an impediment to progress," he says. "I think they're in a minority. If I thought they were a majority, I'd leave myself."

Andrist, who is the third generation of his family to run the paper — his father represents the area in the State Senate — actually did leave Crosby for nearly 20 years. He graduated from Divide County High School in 1972, left for college, then spent a decade and a half working as a reporter and editor outside the state, mostly in Minnesota, which seems to draw a lot of people from North Dakota. He returned in 1991 with a different perspective and a wife who grew up elsewhere in the Midwest. This last fact is perhaps what enables him to understand why so many non-Crosbyites see the place as isolated (it's 6 miles from the Canadian border, 70 from the nearest American McDonald's or Wal-Mart, 120 from the nearest shopping mall), insular and clannish. Asked if his wife is now regarded by natives as a Crosbyite, he replies, candidly: "I think she is to the people who are important to her. And I think she'd have a hard time fitting in with other people."

As for the Oehlkes, Esther says that the response to her open letter has been mostly positive, although she also received critical letters that she characterizes as "Survival, yes. Crosby wants survival. But no growth." Their feelings for the town, however, are far from ambivalent. Asked if they'll stay, both respond, without hesitation, "Oh, yes." Esther adds, "I'd do it again." She and Shawn say again and again how much they love Crosby and its people. They have found what they sought here: Small Town America.

And yet, in doing so, they have exposed the paradox at the heart of this transaction. On the one hand, what towns like Crosby are actually selling — really, all they have to sell — is atmosphere, an idyllic image of a place and a way of life most Americans believe is already gone. On the other hand, if these places are truly successful in attracting new people, that atmosphere will, necessarily, change.

Despite the unease that paradox engenders here, Crosby's real choice is not between growth or stasis; it is between growth or decline and, ultimately, death. For his part, Loyd Olin says: "I think it'll get smaller. Of course, you don't like to see it, but then what are you going to do?"

Those in Crosby who want a glimpse of what their future may hold should they choose to do nothing need only drive 12 miles west on Highway 5 to the town of Ambrose. Founded in 1906, Ambrose was the first county seat and once bore the nickname the Queen City of Divide County. The "W.P.A. Guide to North Dakota," first published in 1938, recounts that Ambrose "in its early history was one of the greatest primary grain markets in the Northwest. With 5 elevators, and many hawkers buying on the track, as many as 300 grain wagons often crowded the streets." In 1920, Ambrose's population was 389. As of 2004, it was 23.

Forty-two miles south and west of Ambrose, you'll find Hanks, N.D. Once upon a time, according to the W.P.A. guide, as many as 30,000 cattle used to pass through Hanks in a single season on their way to Chicago. Hanks was founded in 1916; in 1926, the town claimed a population of 300. And in 1991, that number was down to 11, and Hanks voted itself out of existence.

To be more precise, the citizens of Hanks voted 7-2 to unincorporate (two residents abstained). The vote, like many previous elections, was held in Lloyd and Avis Kohlman's kitchen and merely confirmed what everyone in town had known for years: Hanks was finished. It is a story that had been playing out quietly for years in scores of towns across the state, but Hanks garnered a little bit of attention by making it official. To the residents, it only made sense: incorporated towns have certain obligations and responsibilities — they need mayors and city councilmen and city auditors and election judges and election clerks — that are difficult to fulfill when the whole town doesn't have a dozen people in it. Still, the dissolution caught a lot of people by surprise. "North Dakota made it very easy to incorporate a town, but very difficult to dissolve one," explains Richard Stenberg, a history professor at Williston State College.

By 1991, Lloyd Kohlman had served on Hanks's town board for decades; Avis had been city auditor since 1953. They raised two sons there, both of whom ended up in Williston — Roger as a pharmacist, Dennis as a high-school teacher. At a certain point, Dennis says, all the young people left Hanks. "If you weren't involved in farming, there was nothing else," he explains.

Dennis is 65 now. When he was a child, he recalls, Hanks still had about 150 people. "It's just been a gradual decline all along," he says. "Mostly, it's just been that people have gotten old and passed away." That would include his parents, who stayed on in Hanks until they died, two days apart, in June 2004. Their deaths reduced the local population to 1.

Hanks sits on Highway 50 in northern Williams County. It is six miles west of the community of Zahl, where the population, according to an informal census, is 8; back in the 1920's, 250 people lived there. Seven miles west of Hanks is the town of Grenora — its name is a contraction of Great Northern Railroad, a branch line of which terminated there — with a population of 195, down from a peak of 525. Grenora still has a functioning school and a few stores and shops and a grocery and a cafe and a bar and even a credit union, but despite that, and the fact that it's the biggest town for more than 40 miles, it just doesn't look like the kind of place that will be around that much longer.

Hanks, on the other hand, doesn't really look like a ghost town, at least not from a distance. Many of its houses appear well kept, as does its old school, which now houses a museum, albeit one that's open only in the summer and then only by appointment. "It'll be closed here not too long," Dennis Kohlman says, "like everything else." It is painful to compare this Hanks with the town Dennis's father first saw as a child. "When we came here in 1921," Lloyd Kohlman told The Williston Daily Herald 70 years later, "there wasn't room for another business on Main Street." Today, Main Street is overgrown; you wouldn't be able to find it at all unless someone who knew showed you where it used to be. The stores have all been torn down or carted off, used for storage or lumber. Only the old State Bank of Hanks building, weather-beaten and crumbling, still stands — and next to it, an old red gasoline pump.

The only person left in Hanks is Debra Quarne. She lived there as a child, moved to Montana when she was 10 and then returned in 1981 and moved into her grandmother's old house; it was built in 1914 by a man named Alfred Karlson, who dug out the basement by hand. There were no usable springs in Hanks — the groundwater was too high in salt and nitrates — so people hauled in their water from other towns and kept it in basement cisterns. "You can imagine what it was like hauling that water when it was 18, 20 degrees below zero," Quarne says. In 1991, shortly before the town unincorporated, the other residents asked her if she wanted to be mayor. She declined.

Still, she stayed after everyone else left or died. Asked what it's like to be the only person left in Hanks, Quarne, who raises horses, says: "Quiet. You got to stock up on groceries. You get snowed in, it could be four days before someone gets you out." She says she likes the seclusion but admits: "It's sad. It is, you know."

In 1991 Avis Kohlman told The Herald: "We don't have anything anymore. We don't have a church. Everything is gone.. . .We aren't on the map because we don't have a post office. So you kind of lose your identity." After she and Lloyd died, her son sold their house. "I had a hard time with that," he confesses. "But I didn't want it to end up like that place," he adds, gesturing at the old bank. He is not sure what the buyer, a man in Williston, plans to do with it; the house next door, once the home of a family named Rodvold, is now being used by others from Williston as a hunting lodge.

The railroad branch line that gave birth to Hanks and Zahl and Grenora and nearly a dozen other towns shut down in 1998; the company even pulled up its tracks. Hanks, everyone agrees, will never come back. "It'll never be anything more than it is now," Kohlman says.

"And the same thing'll happen to Grenora," Quarne adds.

"It'll just take a little longer," Kohlman concludes. And that, he says, is just the surface view of things. "Our perception of what a small town is has changed," he says. "Today, Williston is a small town. Just like our perception of small farms has changed. It used to be one quarter. Today, 10 quarters is a small farm."

Professor Stenberg agrees. And when it comes to predictions, he says the area will either redefine itself and rebound or it will be "last one out, shut the lights off." Like many other people in the area, he's doggedly optimistic. Or at least he wants to be. But pressed to say what he thinks northwest North Dakota's small towns are going to look like in 20 or 50 years, he sighs and answers: "I don't think they're going to be there. There may be a historic marker there, but that's it."

Tourism, which has been a savior of sorts for so much of rural America in decline, has never been as big in North Dakota as it has been elsewhere; the least-visited state in the nation, North Dakota's biggest draws are sites that Lewis and Clark passed through 200 years ago. But folks who are nostalgic for Small Town America might want to consider taking their next vacation in northwest North Dakota, where, if they visit soon, they can see such places before they disappear forever, where they can walk the streets and chat with the few folks who remain and drop in on quaint little establishments like the Centennial Bar in Grenora, where they happen to serve excellent hamburgers. Get one while you still can.

Richard Rubin is the author of "Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South." He last wrote for the magazine about the Emmett Till case.

    Not Far From Forsaken, NYT, 89.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09dakota.html?hp&ex=1144641600&en=9d316ebb2832e5ef&ei=5094&partner=homepage

1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America's Emptiest County

February 25, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

MENTONE, Tex. — How empty is Loving County?

So empty that when Sheriff Billy Burt Hopper ran for office in 2004, he and his opponent attended each other's campaign barbecues. So empty that it cannot sustain two political parties: Republicans and Democrats all call themselves Democrats and vote in a single primary.

So empty that it has trouble seating 12 jurors who are not related to a defendant. (Not that there is much crime, although — or maybe because — Sheriff Hopper patrols in a pickup with two shotguns and an AK-47.) So empty that the jail was moved to Pecos in Reeves County, 26 miles away, in 1994.

In fact, this is the emptiest county seat of the emptiest county in the country.

At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 others are spread throughout the rest of Loving County's 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes — about one person for every nine square miles.

But Loving County, east of the Pecos River just below New Mexico, is blessed with mineral riches: 360 producing gas and oil wells and 18 more being drilled, creating an enviable problem for the county — forcing it to keep lowering its tax rate.

Yet it is modest enough, as a plaque outside the courthouse confesses: "Mentone has no water system (water is hauled in) nor does it have a bank, doctor, hospital, newspaper, lawyer, civic club or cemetery."

And since Mentone is the only town, neither does Loving County.

What it does have is the Boot Track Café (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county's oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

"When I was little, I couldn't wait to leave," said Beverly Hanson, the county clerk. Then, she said, "I went to see the bright lights" — she became an apartment manager in Dallas — married and divorced and happily returned home. "I knew I was safe here," she said.

Loving County may be empty all right. But not so empty that it escapes the burden of history: three of its sons have fought in Iraq. And it landed $30,000 in antiterrorism money from the Department of Homeland Security to upgrade its emergency radio system.

Loving County never had an easy time. It is the only Texas county to have been organized twice. It was named for Oliver Loving, a trail-blazing cattleman who drove Texas herds to Illinois before the Civil War; he was later shot by Indians and, according to one story, crawled five miles chewing on a kid glove for food before eventually succumbing to gangrene. He appears as Augustus McCrae in Larry McMurtry's novel "Lonesome Dove."

With only three people on record as living in Mentone — named by a homesick French surveyor in tribute to a city in his native land — somehow 83 votes were cast to organize the county in 1893. But within a few years, the county officials had fled the area. The county was dissolved in 1897 and not reorganized until 1931.

Sheriff Hopper's forebears settled in Loving County in 1906. He was born in Odessa and arrived in Mentone as a 1-year old in 1938. The town was booming then, he said, with 300 people and four restaurants, three gas stations, a hotel and a bowling alley. But residents started moving away during World War II.

By 1951 Mr. Hopper was among only eight students in the high school, which shared a single schoolhouse with the lower grades. The next year he was the last of the eight to leave, moving to the high school in Pecos.

Mr. Hopper, a former Air Force nuclear weapons technician, became the deputy sheriff in 1999 and ran for sheriff in 2004 against a former sheriff's son. The race went down to the wire, ending in a tie, 41 to 41; Mr. Hopper won the runoff, 51 to 38.

Curiously, both vote totals exceeded the entire population of Loving County, put at 67 by the census in 2000. (In 2004, the Census Bureau estimated the population at 52, while Sheriff Hopper, after a house-to-house count, puts it now at 71).

Easily explainable, the sheriff said. Election time brings family members flocking in from afar or sending in absentee ballots. They may not live here year-round, he said, but as long as they "intend" to make it their home they may keep Loving County as their voting address to swing elections to relatives or friends and defeat tax-raising bond-issues.

But others had caught on to the system too.

The newly elected sheriff had barely pinned on his star in January 2005, he recalled, when his phone rang with an old-fashioned warning: "You don't know it, but you're in trouble." A group was planning a takeover of the county, said the caller, a woman in Arizona who promised to send him some information by e-mail.

The material described the plans of a Libertarian faction in its own words "to win most of the elected offices in the county administration" and "restore to freedom" Loving County. The blueprint, called "Restoring Loving County," said that land was hard to come by but that a ranch had been split up and members were in the process of buying sections.

"The people who are living there will be able to register to vote," it said. "They must swear that they intend to make Loving their home."

The goal, said an e-mail message attributed to a group member, was to move in enough Libertarians "to control the local government and remove oppressive regulations (such as planning and zoning, and building code requirements) and stop enforcement of laws prohibiting victimless acts among consenting adults such as dueling, gambling, incest, price-gouging, cannibalism and drug handling."

Leading the effort, the material showed, was Lawrence Edward Pendarvis, a computer analyst from Brandon, Fla., and operator of a Philippine mail-order-bride Web site who has run into a storm of opposition for trying to establish a similar "Free State Project" in Grafton, N.H. He was convicted in Florida in 1997 of downloading child pornography, but the charges were overturned on appeal due to a prosecutorial error.

Days after he received the material, Sheriff Hopper said, Mr. Pendarvis and two other Libertarians, Bobby Y. Emory and Don B. Duncan, showed up to look for land and last fall, claiming they had bought property on eBay, filed voter-registration forms. But, the sheriff said, after checking deeds at the county courthouse, he talked to the presumed sellers, who were in California, and was told the property had been sold to other buyers. He and the Texas ranger in Fort Stockton, 75 miles away, then filed misdemeanor charges against the three men, who had left the state.

"We need people, we need people bad, don't get me wrong," said Sheriff Hopper, 68, who is also the registrar of voters, tax assessor and collector. "But we don't need that deal."

Mr. Pendarvis, reached in Florida, said that his group had a canceled check that proved they had properly bought the 126 acres for $30,000 and that they were operating within the law. "We've been trying to buy land for a year," he said, "but every time they find out who it is they say, 'Oh, we made a mistake.' "

Sheriff Hopper said even though the charge was only a misdemeanor, the three men faced arrest if they showed up in Loving County. "We're letting them know we know what they're up to," he said.

Now pictures of the three decorate a poster on the sheriff's door at the Loving County Courthouse under the timeworn Wild West legend: "Wanted by the Texas Rangers."

Meanwhile, the sheriff said, life was getting back to normal in Loving County. "See those doves," he said, nodding at the birds silhouetted on a wire. "I counted 205 one night waiting to get into the trees."

    1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America's Emptiest County, NYT, 25.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/national/25loving.html?hp&ex=1140930000&en=a7ff735cc7ef7510&ei=5094&partner=homepage