The Rural West’s Most Prosperous Counties

By Matthew Frank, 11-11-07

If you were looking for a rural community where people worked, graduated from school, lived in good homes and stayed out of poverty, this list is where you’d want to start.

Bill Bishop of Daily Yonder, a “daily multi-media buffet” of everything rural, has a piece about rural America’s most prosperous counties, derived from a study conducted by University of Illinois economist Andrew Isserman.

(The communities) can be found in Georgia and Wisconsin, Kentucky and North Dakota. These prosperous places aren’t vacation havens or golf course retirement compounds. They are everyday places, most of them, where people live, work and learn. They are examples of the kind of communities every rural county can become.

Some of these communities can be found in the Rocky Mountain West, too. A list is below.

Isserman recently proposed that instead of looking for success in growing populations and higher incomes, rural communities should seek to become prosperous. They should be places with affordable and well-maintained housing; a well-educated population; plenty of work; and few poor families.

Click here for Isserman’s full list (these are counties that have either 90 percent of their populations living in rural areas or have no town with a population of more than 10,000 people); here for Daily Yonder’s story; and here to go straight to Isserman’s paper.

Prosperous Counties in the Rockies - Population in 2000

Chaffee County, Colorado - 16,242
Cheyenne County, Colorado - 2,231
Delta County, Colorado - 27,834
Grand County, Colorado - 12,442
Kiowa County, Colorado - 1,622
Kit Carson County, Colorado - 8,011
Mineral County, Colorado - 831
Phillips County, Colorado - 4,480
Routt County, Colorado - 19,690
Sedgwick County, Colorado - 2,747
Washington County, Colorado - 4,926

Camas County, Idaho - 991
Caribou County, Idaho - 7,304
Oneida County, Idaho - 4,125

Sweet Grass County, Montana - 3,609

Beaver County, Utah - 6,005
Kane County, Utah - 6,046
Rich County, Utah - 1,961

Converse County, Wyoming - 12,052
Crook County, Wyoming - 5,887
Hot Springs County, Wyoming - 4,882
Lincoln County, Wyoming - 14,573
Sublette County, Wyoming - 5,920
Weston County, Wyoming - 6,644