When I left  North Dakota in the eighties, it seemed like rural America was on the verge of drying up and blowing away.

Of course, it was a historically lousy time for farmers and farming – and a time when there just wasn’t much more than that to draw people to a small town, unless one specifically sought out the small-town life.

Which I, for one, certainly did not.

Anyway – times have changed.  Not just in NoDak – perhaps you’ve heard, they found oil – but also in rural Minnesota:

Amid what has been described as a new “golden age” for farm profits and land wealth, the list of the 50 Minnesota counties with the fastest-growing incomes since 2005 includes only one big Twin Cities county. The state’s net farm income has nearly doubled, from $4.5 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2012.

The town of Jackson, in southwest Minnesota, was one of only four rural cities over 2,500 to suffer significant losses in numbers during this century’s first decade — then it landed a new employer from Europe offering 1,400 jobs.

Studying trends in retail, Craig and a colleague uncovered what they called “astounding” growth in consumer sales in regional centers such as Mankato and Brainerd, and “remarkable” increases in economic activity in many smaller communities — stiff reproofs to the “myth of rural decline and ghost towns.”

The spread of technology helps, of course. One of the worst things about small-town life, if you weren’t wired to appreciate it or didn’t live to spend your days in deer stands or on fishing boats, was the stultifying isolation. That’s much less a factor these days.

Oh, yeah – and I wrote about this almost seven years ago. Joel Kotkin’s been predicting this for a long time; as technology makes small towns, especially the exurbs, less isolated, growth will shift there.  Cities will become playgrounds of the wealthy and warehouses for the poor; everyone else will be living in Watertown.