Weird census outcome: Jefferson County, Iowa

 

Fairfield town square, 2019

When my friends and I visited Fairfield two summers ago, I was intrigued by the area's ability to buck the trend of depopulating small town Iowa (and much of the rest of America as well). At the time, based on census estimates, Jefferson County was one of seven Iowa counties that was growing faster in the 2010s than the United States as a whole. The other six were around Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, the state's two largest metropolitan areas.

Come the 2020 census data, released this summer, and the picture is about the same, with six counties growing faster than the United States' growth rate of 7.4 percent for the decade:

1. Dallas (west of Des Moines) + 50.7%
2. Johnson (Iowa City, south of Cedar Rapids) + 16.8%
3. Polk (Des Moines) + 14.3%
4. Warren (south of Des Moines) + 13.4%
5. Story (Ames, north of Des Moines) + 10.0%
6. Linn (Cedar Rapids) +9.0%

Missing from the list? Jefferson County. Incomprehensibly, it shows at 7.0 percent drop for the decade, making Iowa's seventh biggest loss for a county.

The annual Census estimates for Jefferson County show steady growth through the decade:

YEAR	POPULATION
2010 census	16,843
2011 est	17,096
2012 est	17,278
2013 est	17,629
2014 est	17,793
2015 est	17,906
2016 est	18,063
2017 est	18,219
2018 est	18,256
2019 est	18,295
2020 census	15,663

Based on those estimates, I confidently predicted in 2019 that "In 2020 it will surely break its census record; the previous mark of 17,839 was set in... 1870!" Instead, we're looking at the lowest figure since 1890. 

Barring a sudden mass exodus from Fairfield, or a boycott of the census by its residents, I can provide no reasonable explanation for this. I've reached out to my Fairfield contact to see if there's been any local response.

Jefferson County aside, the largest population increases among rural counties in Iowa are Sioux (6.4%) and Dickinson (6.2%) in the northwest Iowa Great Lakes region, followed by Marion (5.5%) and Clarke (5.0%), which are south of Des Moines. Southwest Iowa suffered the broadest population losses--far southwest Fremont County lost 11.2 percent--with the northern third of Iowa away from the Missouri River mostly negative as well.

SEE ALSO: "Small Towns, Rural Areas, and State Legislatures," 11 June 2019