Crisis in the Great Plains: The Dying of the Little Towns -- The Economist

Link here.

TEN years ago, 1,200 people lived in New England, North Dakota. This was a boom town, if a small one. The nearby railway carried some of the world’s best hard red spring wheat to market. But by the early 1990s the railway had stopped coming to town. Decay spread along Main Street: restaurants and petrol stations shut, and so did the Catholic school. Today only one restaurant serves New England’s 600 people. Decrepit store-fronts gape into the street. Down the road, in Mott, the last rural Catholic school in the western half of the state has just closed.


It is not just Mott and New England that feel the slow exodus. All across the Great Plains, small towns are losing their livelihood. Crop disease, drought, floods and blizzards have ravaged North Dakota’s farms. Even worse, as the area’s anxious farmers will tell you, is the seemingly limitless fall in the price of grain and beef. Record world supplies of grain, and a remarkable dearth of crop disasters outside America, have made much of the wheat here worth little more than chaff. In rural towns across North Dakota, says one farmer, “There is a slow acquiescence to fate.”

September 16, 1999


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Comment elsewhere regarding the boom:

If it comes, it's the oil curse. Rural, western counties in North Dakota are unable to keep up with rural highway maintenance due to the increase in heavy, under-taxed road damaging vehicles, local rents skyrocket from $450/ month to $1500/month - long- time tenants are given notice and when they can't pay are tossed out; local businesses are unable to find or keep help because they cannot pay oil field wages.

October 20, 2011