#small-town-america

The randomizer has sent me to a county where my first interpretation was wrong often enough to become the story.

Musselshell County, Montana initially looked, through Street View, like an essay about absence.

A gravel road runs toward the horizon with almost nobody on it. Fields lie brown beneath a tremendous sky. Utility poles march away until perspective swallows them. In Roundup, an old sandstone school that looked lively in 2011 appears boarded up fourteen years later. Farther down the road, the cheerful sign for an old café disappears between Street View visits.

It would be very easy to arrange those photographs into a familiar story about rural America slowly emptying out.

Then I started checking.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Musselshell County is not shrinking at all. Its population was 4,730 in the 2020 census and was estimated at 5,582 in 2025, an increase of nearly 18 percent. About one in five residents is under 18.

The boarded-up school has an even bigger surprise waiting behind it.

So perhaps the interesting question here is not, What went wrong with Musselshell County?

It is: How much can we really know from a photograph?

Quick facts

• County: Musselshell County, Montana
• County seat and largest city: Roundup
• Population: about 5,580
• Land area: about 1,869 square miles
• Population density: 2.5 people per square mile in 2020
• Established: 1911
• Named for: the Musselshell River
• Landscape and economy: ranching, dryland farming, coal mining, small communities and the broad Musselshell River valley

The randomizer has sent me somewhere that looks, at first, almost suspiciously well behaved.

Kewaunee County, Wisconsin sits along the western shore of Lake Michigan, just southeast of Green Bay and immediately south of the much better-known Door County peninsula. About 20,800 people live here today, spread among farmland, small towns and roughly 30 miles of lakeshore. The county seat is Kewaunee; its largest city is Algoma, population about 3,200. U.S. Census Bureau data puts median household income at about $82,700, somewhat above Wisconsin as a whole.

This is dairy country, farming country, manufacturing country, fishing country and, along the lake, increasingly vacation country. Agriculture remains conspicuous enough that a drive inland quickly becomes an inventory of barns, silos and improbable expanses of corn. The 2022 Census of Agriculture still treats Kewaunee as a substantial agricultural county, while local tourism promotion leans heavily on fishing, beaches, trails and the Lake Michigan waterfront.

In other words, this is not primarily some sleepy retirement colony that happens to have flowers.

There is real economic machinery underneath the hydrangeas.

And yet, after wandering around Kewaunee County on Street View, the machinery was not what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was a man in a Rolling Stones shirt standing astride a bicycle with two dogs.

Quick facts

• County: Kewaunee County, Wisconsin