Map credit: Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. (Click for bigger image.)
Image credit: Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service
Except for a brief period during the Civil War, the population of Virginia has increased steadily as long as anyone has kept track. But the pattern of growth varied as the nation evolved from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial economy and then to a knowledge-based economy. Many once-dynamic jurisdictions have gone into decline and, bucking the overall statewide trend, have lost population.
Hamilton Lombard with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has published a fascinating map showing the decades of peak population for Virginia’s cities and counties, as seen above. While roughly half the state’s cities and counties reached peak population last year in 2013 (no numbers yet for 2014), large swaths reached their apogee decades ago. Indeed seven counties saw their glory years in the 1800s. Amelia County’s heyday was 1790.
Lombard’s article traces population growth through the tobacco era, the New South industrialization and the rise of independent cities. A couple of patterns strike me from my eyeballing of the map:
- Many of Virginia’s larger “cities” — Norfolk, Richmond, Portsmouth, Roanoke peaked in the 1960-1970 era before urban decay white/middle-class flight set in.
- The coalfields of Southwest Virginia reached their zenith in the 1950s after decades of growth in the coal industry, although a couple of counties didn’t peak until the coal revival of the 1970s.
- Much of Southside Virginia peaked in the 1920s-50s, although a couple of mill towns — Danville and Martinsville — and their neighboring counties continued growing until 1980.
- Not all growth has been concentrated in the Washington, Richmond and Hampton Roads metropolitan regions. The Interstate 81 corridor stretching between Winchester, Roanoke and Bristol has provided a secondary locus of population growth (with the main exception being Rockbridge County).
Bacon’s bottom line: Beware ye, exurban counties, who think ye shall grow forever. Fortunes change.
— JAB
