Elbow room…..Population numbers roll off census charts in downward spirals through most of Eastern Montana history.

"The population is aging, the kids aren’t staying and the farms are getting bigger. I don’t see a change in that trend," said Sheridan County Agent Terry Angvick. "Where that’s going to stop, I don’t know.”

Maybe it isn’t going to.

U.S. Census projections as far in the future as 2025 don’t anticipate big population surges anywhere in Eastern Montana except in Yellowstone County. Estimates for agriculturally dependent counties forecast that some will stabilize and some may realize modest gains in the next 20 years. But 20 Montana counties, 13 of them in the eastern third of the state, are forecast to continue a slow decline.

With the exception of Valley and Dawson, Eastern Montana counties on that list are those with already low populations – Carter, Daniels, Fallon, Garfield, McCone, Petroleum, Philips, Powder River, Prairie, Sheridan and Treasure. At the last census, Petroleum, which ranks dead last in the Montana population sweepstakes, had just 519 people. Estimates for 2004 put its population as 492. The projection for 2025 is 460.

By LORNA THACKERAY
Of The Gazette Staff

Full Story: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&tts=1&display=rednews/2005/05/09/build/state/30-elbo-room_x.inc

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Where is Eastern Montana, exactly?

By ED KEMMICK
Of The Gazette Staff

A map will tell you exactly where North and South Carolina meet. Ditto with North and South Korea and, before the Iron Curtain crumbled, East Germany and West Germany.

But does anybody really know where Eastern Montana is? Here at The Gazette, the two halves of the state are considered distinct enough that we capitalize Eastern Montana and Western Montana, though not northern Montana or southeastern Montana.

So, if it’s distinct, where is it? That depends on whom you ask.

Full Story: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/05/09/build/state/32-where-is-emt.inc

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Land in the rearview mirror

By LORNA THACKERAY
Of The Gazette Staff

Scobey School Superintendent Dave Selvig can record the fading of Daniels County’s population by counting heads on the playground.

This spring, 24 seniors will graduate. Next fall, 17 kindergarteners will enroll.

Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the graduates will go to college, Selvig said. Few of them will be back.

"There’s just nothing to keep people here,” he sighed.

As in most of rural Eastern Montana, the reasons to stay get fewer every year – fewer jobs, fewer farms, fewer opportunities.

Seventy-five years ago, 5,553 people were scattered across Daniels County, cluttering the rolling prairie to the Canadian border with their homestead shacks and neat, two-story farmhouses.

Lured by railroad promoters, local boosters and promises of free land, they came by the hundreds. "Squatters" settled on 160- or 320-acre homestead tracts, often around railroad towns built seven or eight miles apart to water steam locomotives that the Great Northern and Soo Line rolled across branch lines.

Today, the U.S. Census estimates the population of Daniels County at 1,844, about one-third the number living there in 1930. Once-thriving communities have dwindled to a cluster of old houses around grain elevators. Some have disappeared altogether.

Declining population hits schools hardest.

Full Story: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?display=rednews/2005/05/08/build/state/30-rearview-mirror_x.inc

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City lights: E. Montana story stirs much debate

Ed Kemmick
CITY LIGHTS

Can we agree to disagree on a geographical definition of Eastern Montana?

For the second day of a Gazette series on the changing face of Eastern Montana last Monday, I wrote a piece in which various knowledgeable people weighed in on the question of what constitutes that part of the state.

There wasn’t anything like consensus on the question, but after consulting several newsroom colleagues, I decided to throw the editorial weight of the newspaper behind the definition put forward by Jim Curry, a reference librarian and keeper of the Montana Room at Parmly Billings Library.

Full Story: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/05/15/build/local/40-kemmick.inc