HOULTON – When the B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers left Loring Air Force Base in 1994, they took a sizable hunk of Aroostook County’s population with them.

In 1990, the population of Limestone, with Loring included, made it the second-largest town in The County. The loss of more than 7,500 people there in 1994 caused the town to drop to eighth in the standings of 72 communities in the 2000 Census.

Outside of Limestone, nine other towns near the base also provided off-site housing for military families – Presque Isle alone had 150 base housing units at Bon Aire – and some of those towns have seen population drops as high as 20 percent.

If the base’s population is taken out of the equation for Limestone and the three largest communities near it, however, the drop over the last 10 years for Aroostook County is more in the vicinity of 5 percent or 6 percent, rather than the 15 percent reflected in the census.

That keeps it more in line, for example, with Piscataquis County’s 7.6 percent loss and Washington County’s 3.9 percent drop.

The numbers, however, are what people see, and that, according to Brian Hamel, president of the Loring Development Authority, paints the wrong picture.

“You see a huge drop, and for people outside The County, that says devastation, hinterland, economic depression,” he said recently. “We have to deal with that perception problem until the next set of statistics comes out.”

The LDA is responsible for recruiting businesses to the former U.S. Air Force base. The idea that residents are running for their lives to get out of Aroostook County, according to Hamel, is not good for his business.

“It defeats everything we’ve tried to accomplish over the last several years,” he said.

While the closure of the base was the most dramatic and immediate cause for more than half of The County’s population loss of nearly 13,000 people over the last decade, it isn’t the only factor. Other, more subtle changes also were taking place. One of those was in agriculture.

While broccoli increasingly has become a crop of importance in the region and farmers continue to experiment with other crops, such as barley and flax, none has come close to replacing Aroostook’s No. 1 agriculture commodity, the potato.

Ten years ago, there were as many as 700 growers in the region working about 80,000 acres. Today there are 400 growers, and acreage had dropped to 60,000.

“We impact a lot of people when we lose a grower,” said Mike Corey, executive director of the Maine Potato Board, which has headquarters in Presque Isle. “Each one of those growers employs a number of people: one to four full time, plus their spring and fall help.”

Fort Fairfield, for example, dropped in population from 3,998 to 3,579, a decrease of more than 10 percent. During the past 10 years, three major family farm operations have closed down, with subsequent ripple effects throughout the community.

In one family, members moved to Florida and Georgia. Some members of a second family moved to the Bangor area, while the third family had members spread across the United States, including to Arizona and the Virginia area.

The decline of the family farm has contributed to the region’s population loss as people look for jobs elsewhere.

“The young sons and daughters who would otherwise work on the farm or take over the farm have chosen careers out of the area that [take] them, if not out of the state, then to southern Maine,” said Corey.

It isn’t just the lack of farm jobs. Sometimes it’s the lack of enough well-paying jobs to keep young people in the area.

College students who invest two or four years getting associate or bachelor’s degrees are less willing to work for wages that are half of what they could make in southern parts of Maine or out of state.

The Public Health Research Group based in Portland ranks Aroostook County 13th out of the state’s 16 counties, with fewer than 25 percent of workers earning a gross salary of $35,000 or more – about $17 an hour.

According to information supplied by the Northern Maine Development Commission, the median income for a family of four in Aroostook County is $19,200 a year.

In a report prepared in 1999 for the NMDC concerning the Presque Isle-Caribou labor market, more than 43 percent of the respondents said their major reasons for looking for a new job – either in Aroostook County or elsewhere – were getting additional pay and making better use of their skills and education.

“It’s not uncommon for our youth to want to experience something on the other side when they go to college,” said Hamel. “It’s our job to provide them with an opportunity when they get done college … to bring them back to Aroostook County.”

When people do leave, they take their families with them, and their children are less likely to return to Aroostook later on. In the last six years, 10 schools in Aroostook County have closed because of a loss of students.

Closing a local school is not an easy process, and some of the closings were preceded by fierce battles that divided towns.

“Some people feel like they’ve lost part of their identity,” said Debra O’Roak, the town manager in Sherman, where the local elementary school was closed in 1997 when SAD 25 decided to consolidate four elementary schools into one.

The battle in SAD 25 raged on and off for more than a dozen years. O’Roak, whose children are now in college, admits that when they were younger, “I wanted them to go to Sherman.”

The sense of loss in Sherman was softened when the town office moved into the school building. The regional economic development organization also rents a room for an office, a nursery school uses one of the classrooms, a driving school rents office space in another, and the Boy Scouts meet there, O’Roak said.

The town received a grant to build a playground nearby, and, coupled with the town’s gym on the same property, the area of the school has remained an active part of the town.

“A lot of people felt [reusing the school] was a wise move,” said O’Roak, noting that other towns have boarded up their schools or sold them. “It’s part of their identify, it’s a sense of security.”

Figures in the 2000 Census show that since 1990, Aroostook County’s population for people younger than age 18 has decreased more than 25 percent.

A sampling of statistics for the period 1997-2000 for 10 cities and towns across the county, however, shows that in seven of those towns, total recorded births were greater than total deaths.

Historically, said Hamel, there has always been the perception that there’s not a lot to do in Aroostook County.

“The continued decline in population sends the message to young people that Aroostook is not the place to be, so they leave,” he said. “We need to provide an opportunity for youth to want to come back.”