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MARK STEIL: Walking on the main street of Marietta with Mayor Don Ransom, it's easy to feel the presence of ghosts everywhere.

DON RANSOM: The old bank building is gone, the restaurant, and the locker plant. Then over on the east side, there was the beer joint, which is gone.

MARK STEIL: The businesses have disappeared, and so have most of the buildings which house them, torn down as fire traps. Ransom blames the trend toward bigger farms as the main cause of his town's decline. Fewer families working more acres means less money spent on Marietta's main street. Ransom has lived all his 73 years in this town near the South Dakota border. He's not happy with the changes.

DON RANSOM: Well, there isn't much you can do about it. You lose them. That's it.

MARK STEIL: Census figures show Marietta's population has fallen 15% the last 10 years. Fewer than 200 people live here. The downtown business area is basically a bank, post office, and hardware store. It's happening all over Lac Qui Parle County, where the population peaked in the 1920s at more than 15,000. Now it's about half that. Mayor Ransom is not looking for big changes in Marietta anytime soon.

DON RANSOM: I would doubt any business development will ever move in unless somebody won the lottery.

MARK STEIL: On the northern edge of Lac Qui Parle County, the town of Louisburg is also facing a slow population ebb. It's even smaller than Marietta-- about 40 people. The only business is a grain elevator. It's so small, Mayor Spencer Jensen has committed every nook and cranny to memory. When asked how many houses Louisburg has, he leans back and half closes his eyes.

SPENCER JENSEN: OK, let's see. There's one, two, three, four, five, six.

MARK STEIL: Jensen says most of the houses sold in Louisburg are bought by hunters from the Twin Cities, who use them as base camps to hunt geese at nearby Lac Qui Parle wildlife area.

SPENCER JENSEN: The way the declining population is going here, I'm guessing-- I ain't going to say the years. But in a few years, why, it's probably going to be a hunter city.

MARK STEIL: The towns of Marietta and Louisburg are symbols of what's happening all over Lac Qui Parle County, Western Minnesota, and even the Great Plains, a decline as slow and gradual as the graceful but certain change weather brings to the old farm buildings dotting the landscape. State demographer Tom Gillaspy says the best news is that the population losses in most counties were not as bad during the '90s as in the 1980s. But he expects the overall decline to continue.

TOM GILLASPY: When you have a situation where you have a relatively old population, and you have actually more people dying than are being born, it's really hard to turn that around.

MARK STEIL: But the residents of Lac Qui Parle County are not without hope. In Madison, the county seat, a new business has come to town. Cross USA has placed what company officials call a technology center in Madison. The company has similar facilities in Sebeka, Minnesota, and Watford City, North Dakota.

Using high-speed data lines, Cross USA programmers help corporate clients keep their in-house computer networks up to date. The company only has a half dozen employees in Madison now, but that number is expected to grow. Elton Fordyce moved from the Twin Cities to Madison to work for Cross USA. He says his coworkers come from a variety of places-- Alabama, Detroit, as well as the Twin Cities.

ELTON FORDYCE: They're looking for a nice rural area to live in-- quiet, peaceful, and a place where they can go out and enjoy themselves but also do the kind of work that they like doing.

MARK STEIL: Born and raised in Milbank, South Dakota, Fordyce wanted to get back to small town life after 20-some years in a Twin Cities suburb. He walks to work now. He figures the house he bought in Madison for about $50,000 would cost $200,000 in the metro area. That's a selling point for Lac Qui Parle and other Minnesota counties looking for new jobs and people. But so far, the smattering of high-tech jobs in rural areas have not been enough to reverse the long-term population decline. Mark Steil, Minnesota Public Radio.