UPDATE : The Cities Feed a Rebound in Rural Population Growth

Rural America is once more growing by the millions, but the rebound has little to do with the farm. The boom that began in the 1970s, derailed during the farm crisis and heightened overseas competition of the 1980s, is back on track.

A new study shows that rural regions gained 2.6 million residents from April 1990 to July 1995. Of those, 1.6 million moved from metropolitan areas.

Demographers who conducted the study believe that a long-term trend toward rural growth has taken hold, reversing the drain to city and suburb that characterized most of this century.

The ‘80s, they suspect, were a time of testing, not a return to tradition. “The shakeout is over,” said one of the researchers, Kenneth M. Johnson of Loyola University in Chicago.

But don’t picture a pastoral revival with family homesteads, red barns and the Back 40 to plow.

Think instead of Door County, Wis., with a peninsula full of cherry orchards, but also a shipyard that provides industrial jobs in freighter repair and a Lake Michigan shoreline that lures tourists and retirees.

Or Grand Traverse, Mich., where factories churn out automotive parts while Midwesterners open their vacation cottages each summer. Or Pacific Northwest hamlets where recession-weary Californians have fled.

Manufacturing, recreation and retirement are fueling the influx into the less-developed territory. “It’s not just one region. It’s nationwide,” Johnson said. He gathered and analyzed the population figures with Calvin L. Beale, senior demographer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

More than 75% of the 2,304 rural counties are growing, the two researchers found, compared to only 45% during the 1980s.

The only counties that lost population were those that remain dependent on farming and mining. The Great Plains are still emptying, as are the Mississippi Delta and the western Corn Belt.

But everywhere else, it seems, moderately sized towns of 5,000 to 20,000 people are thriving and so is the countryside around them. Johnson and Beale found that 700 rural counties--those without a settlement of at least 50,000 people--have switched status from population losers in the ‘80s to gainers in the ‘90s.

The 1970s were filled with newsmagazine headlines like “Out of the Cities, Back to the Country” and “What Lures Americans Back to the Land.” Reporters combed small towns in Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, Idaho and New York state. They found retirees heading back to their birthplaces, long-distance commuters looking for safety and cleanliness, entrepreneurs escaping the fast pace of city and corporate life.

Thousands of Americans, it seemed, were getting fed up with the metropolis. Rural population growth was an astounding 4.3%, compared to 2.8% in cities and suburbs, from 1970 to 1973.

In the ‘80s came the stall. Family farm foreclosures soared and the manufacturers that had moved into small towns were often victims of global trade wars.

At first, the ‘90s seemed little different, with a dip in rural manufacturing jobs from 4.24 million in 1990 to 4.14 million in 1991, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But the recession of the early ‘90s hit cities harder, and the trend toward just-in-time delivery systems, adopted to catch up with the Japanese, made dispersal of assembly lines and warehouses more attractive. In 1992, rural manufacturing employment inched up to 4.18 million; in 1992, to 4.27 million.

By contrast, the number of metropolitan manufacturing jobs, while still higher than in the countryside, dipped from 15.51 million in 1990 to 14.47 million in 1993. The rise of exurbs, or “edge cities,” at the periphery of the suburbs brought more metropolitan jobs within commuting range of once-isolated small towns as well.

From 1990 to 1995, Johnson said, the rate of growth in rural regions rivaled that of metropolitan areas--5.1% compared to 5.8%.

“The migration to the metropolitan areas is immigrants from overseas,” Johnson said. “The attraction [for native-born Americans] is the non-metro areas.”

Some demographers are now studying how much of the exodus from city to country is related to “white flight.”