WABASH COUNTY, IN (WANE)— This from wane.com: 2025 population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday showed that Wabash County was the of the only counties in northeast Indiana to see a population decline in the last year.
While Wabash County only lost a net of 13 residents from 2024 to 2025, the county has lost 265 since 2020. The gradual loss is not exclusive to the 2020s, though. Wabash County has seen a steady decline in population since peaking near 37,000 residents in 1980. Now the population sits at 30,713.
The county isn’t losing people due to migration. It actually added 98 people in the last year due to migration. But the county’s death rate is about double its birth rate, according to the Wabash County Community Foundation. The county also has an aging population, which will continue to widen the gap between death and birth rates unless it can attract more younger people and families than it currently does. That is one of the main focuses of the Imagine One 85 comprehensive plan adopted by the county in 2022.
“To me, it seems like sort of the imperfect storm where we have, I would call it, a large colony of retired people here,” Julie Garber, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for the Wabash County Community Foundation, said.
According to the President & CEO of the foundation, Alex Downard, the foundation and its community partners are “doubling down” on retaining young people who grew up in the county by investing in them through a variety of programs, and then attracting talent as well. Two main investments the county is focusing on to double down on are education and creating more housing.
“We know that the net migration number is what we can control more so than we can our birth and death rate number,” Downard said. “And so to birth more children, we need to continue to retain young people who grow up in Wabash County and focus on that, as well as attracting new ones to join us.”
In the past three years, Wabash County has seen somewhat of a stabilizing pattern in its population. Overall, since 2023, the population has grown ever so slightly, with a net gain of 13 residents from 2023-2025. The foundation hopes that’s a sign of their turnaround after more than 40 years of steady decline. But it may be an uphill battle, as attracting a large number of new residents can be tough due to the county’s location.
“We don’t have as many bedroom communities out here, or commuters who are going to Fort Wayne and back,” Garber said.
Wabash is an hour drive from Fort Wayne, and about a 1.5-hour drive from South Bend or Indianapolis. It’s part of a “belt” of rural counties that are just outside the periphery of growing metro areas that are losing population. Other counties that fall in this “belt” of population loss include Miami, Cass, Blackford, Fulton, Grant, Jay, Knox, Randolph, and Tipton.
“They’re not located on an interstate,” Rachel Blakeman, the director of Purdue University Fort Wayne’s Community Research Institute, said. “They do have U.S. 24, so there is some connection to Fort Wayne, better than it was 20 years ago. But the problem is that that’s still not reversing the population decline.”