BANGOR – When the U.S. Census Bureau took its 1990 count, Mark LeGassey had just been laid off after 17 years as a quality inspector at Great Northern Paper’s Millinocket mill in northern Penobscot County.

Born and raised in neighboring East Millinocket, LeGassey was well aware that in a region where the paper mills were the only games in town, his future employment options were limited – to say the least.

“In a way, they did me a favor when they laid me off,” said the 42-year-old LeGassey, who now lives with his wife and two boys in Brunswick, where he works as a magnetic resonance imaging technologist at Mid Coast Hospital. “They really got me out of a depressed area … in that town, if you don’t work at the mill, there’s not much else.”

In his decision to leave his hometown, where only mile-high Mount Katahdin looms larger than Great Northern Paper, LeGassey was by no means alone, according to recently released census figures.

Millinocket, East Millinocket and neighboring Medway, collectively, lost 23 percent of their populations – or more than 2,500 people – in the past decade.

That sharp decline – coupled with a similar drop the decade before – roughly coincides with Great Northern Paper’s reduction of its work force from a high of 4,400 in the late 1970s to about 1,300 today at its Millinocket and East Millinocket mills.

The Katahdin region’s decline was in large part responsible for the further shift in population from north to south, with nearly 70 percent of Penobscot County’s population now living south of Old Town, up from 65 percent in 1990.

Bolstered by gains in its suburban communities, the county itself lost fewer than 1,700 people, or just 1 percent of its population, to remain the state’s third largest with 144,919 people. That places Penobscot County behind southern Maine’s Cumberland and York counties, which respectively saw 9 percent and 13 percent growth.

But back in Millinocket, where the population has dropped to 5,203 from a high of more than 7,700 in 1970, the numbers represent a harsh reality to those who remain.

“It stinks,” said Vincent Brunette, a local real estate agent, summing up the area’s real estate market. “There are for-sale signs popping up like mushrooms, but no buyers.”

Like LeGassey, Brunette, too, was born and raised in the area, where he has doubled as Millinocket’s assessor for the past few years. Brunette, 69, has seen the town’s fortunes ebb and flow with those of the mills.

“We’re a one-horse town here, and if the horse is in bad straits, we’re in bad straits,” he said. “In a lot of ways, the town is just like a department of the mill.”

Millinocket town officials, not surprised by the population drop, say they are taking steps to reverse the decades-old trend.

“We’re like a lot of towns in that we have to find a way to broaden our economic base and keep our people,” Town Manager Gene Conlogue said.

The town recently formed an economic development committee, charged with increasing investment and business opportunities in the area, which Conlogue said is ripe for tourism and manufacturing endeavors.

While hopeful for the town’s future, the manager remains realistic.

“We need to make a more concerted effort to diversify,” he said. “If we aren’t successful we will probably have another slight decrease in population in 2010, but at some point we will start going back up the other side.

“But the good news is [that] underneath all this gloomy sky, we have both mills operating, and [they are] still the economic centers of the region, and we hope they will continue to be,” he said.

Thirty miles south, Lincoln, another paper mill town, also saw a decline in its population, dropping about 6.5 percent to 5,221 people. Despite the loss, Lincoln for the first time surpassed Millinocket – incorporated in 1901 – to become the county’s sixth-largest community.

Like the county’s other major population centers, Old Town, Orono and Brewer, the county’s largest city also saw a drop in its population. Bangor, the state’s third-largest city, lost 5.5 percent of its people in the past decade, bringing its population to 31,473.

Just as declines in the state’s two largest cities – Portland and Lewiston – were expected, so was Bangor’s drop. Like its southern Maine counterparts, Bangor shrank while its suburbs grew, with outlying areas such as Glenburn and Hermon posting gains of 24 percent and 18 percent respectively.

But even those substantial gains pale in comparison to that of the outlying town of Levant, which has grown 33 percent since 1990.

For 41 years, Elwood Mason has moderated town meetings in Levant, which last year saw its population reach its highest level since 1850.

“Thirty years ago I knew everybody in town,” said the 72-year-old Mason, who runs a 480-acre deer farm on the Horseback Road. “Now I might recognize the faces, but putting names with them is a different story.”

At the county’s western tip, town officials in Dexter were less than pleased with the 2000 Census results.

“Those numbers startled me,” Town Manager Robert Simpson said last week of his town’s 12 percent drop.

He said the town was “very close” to where it was in 1990. In fact, the number of tax bills has increased. The town mailed 1,922 tax bills (not including seasonal properties and apartments) last year. “I think these are bad numbers. This bothers me because nothing else points in that direction.” He said he had received complaint after complaint that local residents were not counted by the census.

“What you get out of the computer is only as good as what you put in, i.e. garbage in and garbage out, and we’re going to pay for this garbage,” Simpson said, especially on school funding.

“It’s going to continue to exacerbate the north-south issues,” he said. Simpson said he was frustrated with the state government, which to date has provided only “lip service.”

Back in the Millinocket area, circa 1990, Mark LeGassey wasn’t going to wait for the state or anyone else to make things better.

After Great Northern laid him off, LeGassey commuted for three years from his family’s Medway home to the University of Maine and then to Bangor’s Eastern Maine Technical College.

After another year at the University of Virginia, the then-37-year-old LeGassey settled in Brunswick, where his wife, Lisa, works in the city’s school system.

“I suppose I could have stayed up there and been a bus driver or something,” he said of his decision to leave home, where his younger brother still holds a good job at Great Northern Paper’s East Millinocket mill. “For me, I felt like it was a good opportunity to go to college and get an education and do something different.”

NEWS reporter Diana Bowley contributed to this report.