Rural America's Most Prosperous Counties

Fannin County, Georgia is one of the 289 "prosperous" counties, as defined by University of Illinois economist Andrew Isserman. This photo was taken in the town of Blue Ridge.
Photo: terrapin dawg [1]

There are 289 rural counties that have better housing, a more educated population, less poverty and more jobs than the national average. Those counties are listed below.

They 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.

The list comes from Andrew Isserman, an economist at the University of Illinois. 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. (See the Yonder for a full report on Isserman�s study [2] .)

Isserman applied his test to every county in the United States. Today, we look at the most rural of Isserman�s prosperous counties.

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. These counties aren�t close to urban areas and they have a low population density. There are 1,371 strictly rural counties in these terms and 289 are prosperous, according to Isserman.

The Illinois economist finds a number of traits common to these counties. They aren�t on four-lane highways, particularly. They do have more family farms. Check out the Yonder story [2] for more or go straight to Isserman�s paper [3] .

Here are the counties. They are listed by state in alphabetical order and the list includes their 2000 population.