We called farmstead number five the Old Magie Place for the people who once lived there. (Locals also knew it as “Skunk Hollow.”) I never knew these particular Magies, but some of their relatives are still around, and are part of the nearby farming community of Healy, which is home to the smallest school district in the state of Kansas, with a high school enrollment of less than 25 students. The Magies had been gone for decades by this point (circa 2009), and their farm house had become a refuge for wild animals and trespassers looking to drink light beer and break shit. As such, there were little piles of crushed cans, liquor bottles and cigarette butts throughout.
Near the house was fencing around the gardens, which I ripped out with a loader tractor. I demolished the other small barns on the property partly by hand before bulldozing them into a pile to burn. The farm ground all around the house was fallow and not in use. We would till it up later, but first, the house and barns needed to be dealt with.
When I’m out driving the backroads of western Kansas, there’s an empty home like the Old Magie Place every few miles. They remind me that the region has a serious population decline problem, where there’s only the bare minimum number of people to even call it a community. That is, my home county (Lane County) has been losing population since its population peak in the 1960s; the decline, however, has greatly accelerated in my lifetime. Statistically speaking, in the last 20 years, more than a fifth of the local population has gone: fled, retired, moved on or died.
