Plains Towns Fade Away as Youth Move, Jobs Disappear : Nebraska: Aging populations, Social Security support few remaining businesses in once-bustling cities.

The elementary and high school is a pile of twisted steel and smashed concrete on a shaded corner of this town, yards from the cornfields that bump up against back yards. The only signs of children are rotting swing sets and teeter-totters that haven’t been used in years.

A gust sweeps off the prairie and through main street’s withered business district. The Boot Hill Bar beckons motorists to “Play Keno” with three-foot letters painted by an untrained hand. A faded “Sew and So” sign is tacked to the front of an empty building. The bank is now a cafe, where an 80-year-old couple sells $3 fried chicken dinners. In the corner of the library window is a poster advertising an upcoming television documentary: “Fate of the Plains.”

“This is the slow lane,” said Anselmo Mayor George Kellogg, a retired conductor for the Union Pacific railroad.

This is Anselmo, one of hundreds of upper Great Plains towns riding the same slow fade toward extinction as the rotary telephone. The population is emptying out of this vast region because astonishing advances in agriculture production have rendered most farm jobs unnecessary. So the communities where the farmhands once shopped and lived are dying.

“The Great Plains is creating a new era of ghost towns,” said Colleen Murphy, senior fellow at the Center for the New West, a Denver-based think tank.

Anselmo is near the middle of the state between two ways of life. To the north and west are the empty Sand Hills, a rolling region of cattle ranches. To the south and east are the richer, flatter, corn-growing farms that stretch 500 miles away to Illinois.

The village is on the dry side of the 98th meridian that marks the beginning of America’s parched outback. Because of an unforgiving landscape, it was the last part of the country to be settled. Not much grows here without regular drenching from the irrigation center pivots that wheel slowly across cornfields in quarter-mile circles 10 feet above the soil.

This village was once a commerce center and railroad stop, but now the only regular signs of industry are the coal trains that blow through town every 15 minutes, making their way from open pits in Gillette, Wyo., to power plants to the east and south.

The lawyers, doctors, hardware stores and banks departed during the last several decades and are now somewhere between a 20-minute and a two-hour drive to the south. There isn’t an ATM for miles.

Village leaders tout the slowness as an asset; a corner of quietude and intimacy where kids can roam and doors stay unlocked. But “unless you can go to a neighbor’s and play cards and call that an enjoyable evening, you wouldn’t be happy here,” said Mary Bahensky, 42, who raises sheep with her husband, an electrician.

Between 1980 and 1992, populations decreased in 77% of Nebraska towns, according to Census Bureau statistics. Towns with populations over 5,000 fared better; fewer than half of those towns lost population.

All but nine of Nebraska’s 93 counties have a median population age above the national median of 32.9. For example, the median age in Custer County, where Anselmo is located, is 39.1, according to statistics from the Nebraska state government. Experts say the number reflects the loss of young people and the increasing reliance on an elderly population that lives on Social Security.

Of the 65 inhabited houses in Anselmo, about half hold families. The rest belong to middle-aged or elderly people who rely on Social Security checks and Medicare.

“This town would go down the drain without Social Security,” said Marie Kastens, who runs the local market with her husband, Keith.

As has happened to most Great Plains communities, younger citizens have scattered for jobs elsewhere. Village clerk Laura Murphy said the town has survived the worst of the decline and thinks ideas such as building a rodeo arena might help stem the hemorrhage of young people. “We’re struggling. We’re not dying,” she said.

Anselmo’s recent cycle of decline began in the 1960s when the high school merged with that of another town 15 miles down the road. The village lost a third of its population that decade. The elementary school was consolidated with others in the late 1970s.

The marshal quit about seven years ago, but there isn’t much need for law enforcement. The Anselmo police blotter at the Custer County Sheriff’s Department reports that the most violent crime during the last year was the murder of a poodle by three dogs.

“You can trust everybody,” said Tammy Corbin, 30, who drives 20 miles to Broken Bow to work for United Parcel Service.

Except for the one-story, industrial-looking library building, Anselmo’s main street looks like a movie set from the 1930s. On one side are the town park, a mechanic’s repair shop, a shack that served as the town jail and an empty sod building constructed in the 19th Century. Across the street are brick structures dating back nearly 90 years. The Masons left their building years ago. The post office rents out the first floor, where Postmaster Ed Zak knows each one of his 74 mailbox owners on a first-name basis.

Cafe owner Howard Smets looks out his shop window, counting off the businesses that once thrived here. “A barber shop, shoe shop, bologna store, restaurant,” Smets said. “The passenger train stopped two or three times a day. There were three grocery stores.”

The only grocery store these days is Kastens’ Market. As he trims the fat from a slab of beef, Keith Kastens bemoans the mobility of the few remaining residents who drive for hours to shop at the big grocery stores in Grand Island, Kearney or North Platte.

“People don’t feel they’ve done anything until they’ve driven 100 miles,” he said.

Over at the Boot Hill Bar at the end of the business district, owner Ron Booten, 46, sits alone, waiting for people to fill a gallon-size plastic jar with suggestions for the theme of next June’s Big Sky Jubilee, the town blowout that includes a parade, softball tournament and Ping-Pong balls dropped from the sky.

Boot Hill fills up on Prime Rib Saturday Night, but on a weekday the only traffic is a couple of twenty-somethings shooting pool and slapping an air-hockey puck.

Twenty-year-olds are as scarce in small towns as buffalo on the prairie. Twenty-two of 25 graduating high school seniors at Anselmo-Merna High School in June left for college or to find work elsewhere, Principal Larry Caudle said.

“There’s got to be opportunities for kids, and it’s not there unless you’re a ranch hand,” Caudle said. The big employer is the medical supplies plant in Broken Bow, but those jobs are largely taken by older, married adults.

Plains scholars and a presidential task force are studying the problem. Rutgers University professor Frank Popper raised a ruckus when he suggested that people abandon a big chunk of the Plains and make it a buffalo range.

A less radical view is for towns to start thinking of new, home-grown businesses using cattle and crops. The emptiness can even serve as a way to build businesses around tourists who want to get away from the crowded coasts. “We will see some [towns] disappear, but we will see some getting stronger,” said Cornelia Flora of Iowa State University.

Anselmo’s glory days are depicted in a mural on the side of a building celebrating the village’s history. The drawing paints a colorful panorama of days gone by. Cattle are being rounded up by a cowboy on horseback. A train is dropping passengers at the station. A crate of mineral water from nearby Victoria Springs rests on the platform. A windmill spins on the prairie.