Published: 16:01 GMT, 23 November 2025 | Updated: 17:27 GMT, 23 November 2025

Areas of West Virginia that used to employ tens of thousands of people in the now-dying coal industry are facing huge population declines over the next 15 years.

McDowell County, once the world's largest coal producer, will lose 32 percent of its residents by 2040, according to grim projections by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia.

There were 19,111 people living in McDowell County in 2020, when the US Census was last taken. Hamilton Lombard, who leads the center's demographic research group, believes there will be only 13,037 people by 2040.

The county's numbers have already fallen  to just above 17,000 as of 2024. It's a far cry from the population of around 100,000 that the county had in the 1950s at the height of the coal boom.

This is not limited to McDowell, as 10 other nearby counties stand to shed tens of thousands of people between them. This will gradually translate into staggering losses in economic production and tax revenue for the state.

Lombard told the Daily Mail that this ongoing trend is not primarily driven by outward migration, though there are certainly natives, particularly college graduates, who have been moving elsewhere to find opportunity.

In 2019 and 2020, McDowell County had nearly twice as many deaths, 638 total, than births, 339, according to data from the West Virginia Department of Health.

Lombard said: ‘There are really only a few other places in the country that are higher than that. Most of them are retirement communities, and McDowell County is not anything like a retirement community in Florida.'

A decaying, unused church in Switchback, a town in McDowell County. The county is expected to lose 32 percent of its population by 2040