Grain elevators across the street from the Danvers, Minnesota post office Wednesday August 3, 2011. Danvers is one of the post offices in Swift county scheduled to close. Photo by Glen Stubbe

DANVERS, MINN.-Kim Schuerman lives only a couple of hours from the city. But daily life in the world around her seems light years away.

The county jail gets down to one inmate, and the sheriff wonders aloud whether it's worth the expense to keep it open. Folks with family buried in the cemetery are asked to take care of the grounds. An 83-year-old retired farmer drives a scooter down an empty street to water and deadhead the petunias in the city park.

In this serene but increasingly lonely landscape, the news that the Postal Service wants to shut down three post offices within a few minutes' drive, as part of a statewide hit list of 117, draws not so much outrage as a weary "here we go again." And Friday it revealed it is proposing cutting 120,000 U.S. postal jobs.

"Since I've moved here," Schuerman said, "we've lost the grocery store. We've lost the café." Standing alongside beautifully crafted post office boxes whose dials have been turned by leathery farm fingers for generations, she softly added: "This is one of the last things we had."

The sun is slowly setting on parts of rural Minnesota.

Not long before the Postal Service released its long list of communities targeted across the state, Delta Air Lines announced it is withdrawing service from five cities in northern Minnesota. More ominous still, the federal government released the findings of Census 2010, and the verdict for rural Minnesota was sobering:

• Thirty-seven of the 87 counties, and practically all of those in the farm belt, lost population. That's a 50 percent leap from the 25 that shrank in the '90s.
• Six counties lost more than 10 percent of what they'd had. It wasn't that bad for them in the '90s. Swift County, Schuerman's home turf, had it worst of all.

At the same time, the state is pulling back on its once-generous subsidies to small towns. Affluent suburbs are tired of serving, as one suburban lawmaker puts it, as "the ATM" for the rest of the state.

Its aid declining, its own property taxes taking up more and more of the load, even Swift County's relatively prospering city of Benson shrinks back from the cost of overhauling its streets. All things considered, Benson's city manager was asked, does it feel as though the rest of the world is turning its back on you?

"Increasingly, yeah," sighed Rob Wolfington.

A changing world

Not all rural counties are wilting. Pine-studded lakes counties are growing -- and bristling with million-dollar homes where cabins used to be. A wide swath around affluent and growing Rochester is benefitting from its success. Farmers -- "our sheikhs out here," one official jokes -- are enjoying high prices. But in those places furthest from amenities and from interstate highways, it feels like a tipping point is being reached. The Minnesota League of Cities is warning that unless something changes, its members by and large will be broke by 2015, and desperately in the red 10 years from then -- with the smallest rural places suffering the most.

In places that have been losing inhabitants for generations, often the post office is the only government building that isn't locked up most of the time, and so it's the only civic gathering point other than the park.

In Holloway, the café that once drew 10 to 15 guys a morning from farms in all directions to "play cards and shoot the breeze," in Bob Haak's words, has closed. Now the post office next door -- where, he says, "at quarter to 10 each morning people stop in constantly" -- may vanish as well. When it's down to just the liquor store, what has happened to a town and what does its future feel like?

In Washington, the Postmaster General announced that people actually prefer to see post office functions in places such as convenience stores, which are open longer hours. To that, people in the Swift County towns of Danvers and Holloway and Clontarf respond: "What convenience store?"

They do understand that the world has changed.

"I've seen it coming for years," said David Evenson, 33, the mayor of Holloway. "I'm sending payments electronically from my phone, let alone my computer. No wonder no one's using the post office. I don't go there. Yet you're paying someone full time with benefits. It's hard to make it swing."

To visit even the tiniest of them, though, is to find that people do use them. Visitors don't have to wait long before a Marlene Kent crosses the street from the pub in Clontarf to scoop up a package from her box.

Or a Bill Hoberg swings by from the bank in Danvers with a box of mail to drop off with postmaster ("not 'mistress'") Mary Flaten, pushing it through the ancient, Norman Rockwell-like wooden window. A few minutes later, Schuerman dropped in from another local company, saying she visits twice a day, once to collect and once to drop off.

Demographically, there are a lot more seniors in these towns accustomed to old-fashioned mail than there are iPhone users touch-padding an app. Sixteen counties are older than Swift in their ratio of seniors to kids, but even in Swift the two numbers are almost equal. In the metro area, by contrast, even graying counties like Anoka and Ramsey have more than 50,000 more kids than oldsters.

Clinging to an identity

There's also the spiritual side: The row of post office boxes, as a means of chance news-sharing encounters between neighbors, is so potent a symbol of community that when University of Minnesota experts helped design a utopian subdivision in suburban Farmington, they deliberately installed clusters of boxes rather than have home delivery, in hopes of promoting the sort of neighborly elbow-rubbing that sprawl-haters were convinced was disappearing.

Is "community" in that sense automatic in real small towns? Apparently not: An informal online survey of residents of Appleton, a short distance from Danvers and the other hamlets, found that 43 percent gave the town a C, and nearly 25 percent a D or an F, for "creating a sense of community."

"Most of these littler towns don't have the jobs to support the population who live there," Wolfington said. "A lot are farm-based but choose to live in town. I don't want to leave the impression they aren't viable; there's a lot of pride in those communities and they are self-resilient."

Locals blame the closing of Appleton's once-teeming privately owned prison for Swift's population loss, and it's certainly responsible for the off-the-charts nature of it: Appleton lost nearly 1,500 people, or 51 percent, the state's highest loss for a city of more than just a handful of people. But a number of other cities in the county also lost significantly: Holloway (18 percent), De Graff (14 percent), Danvers (10 percent) and Murdock (8 percent) were all in the bottom 150 cities, for percentage loss, among more than 800 in the state.

When legislators ask Gary Carlson, director of intergovernmental relations for the state's League of Cities, why the per-capita cost of supporting rural Minnesota is so high and rising, he says "we're losing a lot of our capita."

With political power bound to shift even further to the suburbs and exurbs after this year's redistricting, and with some of the remotest rural outposts seemingly on an unstoppable slide, is it time to start openly thinking of doing some triage, and stop plunging millions in loans and grants for sewers into places that might soon be ghost towns?

Nobody wants to go there now, it seems -- but it has come up. "In my experience at the Capitol," Carlson said, "people do ask that question -- but they don't push it too far. If you add up all the aid that goes to these tiny cities, it's not a huge percentage of the money the state spends. But it's very, very big for them."

David Peterson • 952-882-9023

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