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Butte Falls: �Birth, death and attrition� Town�s Census decrease stands alone in county By Mark Freeman BUTTE FALLS � This sleepy backwoods town once made "Ripley�s Believe It or Not" books for being the only town in the country surrounded by a fence with a cattle guard on each side of town. The joke always has been that the cattle guards were to keep the cows out and the residents in. But this week�s Census figures appear to show they work better for cows than for people. This town with one post office, one store and one gas station now carries the title as the one incorporated town in Jackson County that lost population in the past decade. U.S. Census Bureau statistics unveiled Thursday show Butte Falls� population fell from 475 residents in 1990 to 439 in 2000 � a drop of just under 8 percent. "It doesn�t seem like it," says Ansel Conley, an 82-year-old lifelong resident of Butte Falls. "You go around and you see as many people as you used to, and it�s not like there�s a lot of vacant houses, either. "But I�ll go along with that, that it�s shrinking," Conley says. "There just aren�t the jobs around." Conley chalks up the loss of 36 residents to the demise of the town�s main employer � the former timber giant Medford Corp., which sold off its holdings during the mid-1990s. From its post-World War I logging heydays through the logging boom of the 1950s to the environmental protectionism of the 1990s, Butte Falls changed little in size, mainly because timber constricts the city limits. The town is surrounded by commercial timber stands, so there is no room to swell its city limits and nothing to annex. There�s also little room for growth inside, where there are few vacant lots available for building. "There�s usually just birth, death and attrition," says Joyce Hailicka, a community activist. "We had a baby born last week and we lost someone last month, so things sort of balance out." While Butte Falls is the only town to lose population, it�s not the only community. White City, which is unincorporated, had a population drop of 425 people, about 7 percent. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.