Henry County defies census trends; city counts paint telling picture

Henry County showed a mixed bag of population growths and declines. Although most communities saw their numbers drop, very few did so by more than 20 people.

Those that grew followed a similar pattern, with neither New London nor Salem adding more than 20 residents.

While most towns saw populations go down, the diffusion of those losses over so many communities minimized the impact, and the county’s total population still grew.

There were, of course, some outliers.

The first is Mt. Pleasant, which boasted a nearly 7% population increase. While the growth defies every trend for the county, it demonstrates the statewide pattern of people moving into cities and out of more remote, rural communities.

Mt. Pleasant Area Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President Kristi Perry said the city’s manufacturing economy was its key to growth.

“We’re very fortunate to be a manufacturing community, and all of our manufacturers have had really good years,” she said. “As long as they stay strong, we’re going to continue to grow. If manufacturing has a tough year, then it’s definitely going to affect our entire community.”

Perry said the academic community in Mt. Pleasant was another contributing factor.

“We are very blessed to have Iowa Wesleyan University,” Perry said. “They are actually growing again, after a number of years where they did not … so that helps our community greatly.”

Another outlier, of sorts, is the disappearance of results for Mount Union, a reminder of the city’s dramatic unincorporation in 2016.

The community is now a “census-designated place,” (or CDP,) processed separately from town and city data on the census. Because of its new designation, Mount Union is now coded into a different data set.

Nonetheless, CDP data shows that Mount Union’s population grew to 120, making it the smallest community in all three Union area counties to gain residents, despite dissolving as a city.

Lasty, Winfield stuck out from other shrinking towns. The community purportedly shrank faster, losing more than 100 residents, but locals suspect there may be a flaw in the data caused by non-responses.

“I think it has to be an issue of people not filling out the census,” Perry said. “I don’t really see any closures or any other reason for that kind of a drop in Winfield in the last 10 years.”

Henry County proved most reflective of statewide racial demographic trends. The area went from 92.1% white-only residents to 87.8%, more or less parallel with the statewide numbers, which went from 91.3% to 84.5%.

Mt. Pleasant was the most diverse in the county, with nearly 20% of its population identifying as people of color. The number offsets the rest of the area, where nearly every other city had less than 10% non-white populations except for Olds, at 13%.