Missouri's fastest-shrinking county seeks way to bring residents back.

Byline: Donna McGuire

TARKIO, Mo. _ Sipping coffee in a farm supply store one morning, Duane Klute pondered whether any of his oldest son's high school classmates still lived in Atchison County.

Tarkio High graduated 32 students in 1986. Klute's son, Steve, stayed and became a farmer, like four generations before him.

And the others? Klute's brow furrowed.

"I can't think of any that stayed," he said. "There's surely somebody."

But not many.

Atchison County _ the fastest-shrinking county in Missouri _ struggles to retain its grown-up children. Family farms have faded away. Businesses have been boarded up, schools shuttered. In each of the last 10 years, deaths have outnumbered births.

It's the too-familiar story of rural America, which now has been withering for a century. New data from Census 2000 confirm that dozens of counties in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and the Dakotas lost population again in the 1990s _ even as the nation was setting a growth record.

Shrinking populations erode local tax bases. They make paying for roads and other services difficult. They reduce the local leadership pool. And sometimes, too few people remain to sustain a community.

"We have been moving Americans out of the countryside into the nation's cities for a century or more," said Mark Drabenstott, director of the Center for Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City.

"At some point along the way, it seems we should…