Buchanan County has already lost more than half the people it had in 1980.
That is not a projection. It is not a forecast from a university demography department. It is what the U.S. Census Bureau’s newly released Vintage 2025 population estimates show when set against the county’s 1980 peak of nearly 38,000 residents. As of July 1, 2025, Buchanan County’s estimated population stands at 18,492 — a loss of more than 19,000 people, or 51 percent, from that peak. And according to projections from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, the county is expected to lose nearly half of its remaining population by 2050.
Do the arithmetic: if the Weldon Cooper projection holds, Buchanan County will have roughly 9,600 residents a quarter century from now.
Virginia’s seven Central Appalachian coalfield counties — Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott, Tazewell and Wise — collectively lost 7,208 people between the 2020 census and the July 2025 estimate, a decline of 4.0 percent in five years. That rate places Virginia’s coalfields in the middle of the four-state Central Appalachian region: worse than Kentucky’s 30 coalfield counties (down 2.5 percent) but not as severe as West Virginia’s 16-county sub-region (down 5.0 percent). Tennessee’s seven former coal counties — benefiting from proximity to Knoxville and Oak Ridge — are the outlier, growing 4.2 percent over the same period. Cardinal News founding editor Dwayne Yancey, who has covered Virginia’s demographic trends closely, first reported these statewide patterns in February 2026.
The county-by-county picture
The table below shows all seven Virginia coalfield counties with their 2020 and 2025 populations, five-year and one-year changes, drawn from the Census Bureau’s CO-EST2025-alldata file.
Buchanan’s 9.1 percent five-year loss is the steepest in the Virginia sub-region and among the worst in the entire 60-county Central Appalachian area. Only McDowell County in West Virginia (down 11.7 percent), Mingo County in West Virginia (down 9.0 percent), and Breathitt and Leslie counties in Kentucky (down 8.5 and 8.4 percent respectively) have fared worse.
Tazewell County, the most populous of Virginia’s seven with 38,635 residents in 2025, had the largest absolute one-year loss at 351 people from 2024 to 2025. Dickenson County, now at 13,236, has declined 6.3 percent since 2020.
Even the relatively modest losses in Russell and Scott counties — down 1.8 and 1.7 percent respectively — represent a continued erosion of communities that cannot easily absorb continued losses at any rate.
Two forces, one direction
What makes the current trajectory different from the depopulation wave of the 1950s and 1960s is the combination of forces now driving it. In that earlier exodus, young people left but were still being born in the region — the population was young, birth rates were high and the loss was primarily one of outmigration. Today, two mechanisms are working in tandem.
The first is continued domestic outmigration: more people are leaving Virginia’s coalfields for other parts of the country than are arriving. Across all seven counties in 2025, the Census estimates show net domestic outmigration of 445 people in that single year. The second, and more structurally corrosive, is natural decrease: deaths are now exceeding births across the sub-region. In the 2025 estimate year, the seven Virginia coalfield counties recorded 923 more deaths than births.
Hamilton Lombard, the estimates program manager at the Weldon Cooper Center, has explained the compounding dynamic: when young families leave, future births are exported somewhere else. Fewer children born today means fewer working-age adults in the next generation, which means fewer births after that. In Buchanan County, the median age has nearly doubled since 1980 — from 26 years to 47 years. The county that was once among Virginia’s youngest is now among its oldest.
The gap between deaths and births in Virginia’s coalfields has widened sharply in recent years. As Yancey reported in earlier Cardinal News coverage, deaths outnumbered births in the seven-county region by 1,123 in 2019, compared to just 321 a decade earlier, citing Lombard’s data. The 2025 figure of 923 suggests the natural decrease continues at a pace that overwhelms even modest improvements in migration.
A note of nuance: Migration is shifting
One number in the recent data deserves careful interpretation. Lombard reported in May 2025, according to Cardinal News, that Virginia’s coalfield counties had experienced the largest relative shift in domestic migration of any region in the state — moving from a net loss of more than 2,300 residents to other parts of the country in 2014 to a net gain of 377 in 2024. That is a real and meaningful change in the migration pattern.
But migration gains cannot offset natural decrease running at nearly three times that rate. Even if the net domestic migration figures continue to improve, the age structure of the population — heavily skewed toward older residents with fewer women of childbearing age — means births will remain well below deaths for the foreseeable future. The population arithmetic is working against the region regardless of whether the migration trend holds.
The regional context
Virginia’s coalfield losses, severe as they are, occur within a broader regional catastrophe. The 60 ARC-designated Central Appalachian coalfield counties across the four-state region — 30 in Kentucky, 16 in West Virginia, seven in Virginia, and seven in Tennessee — lost approximately 49,000 people combined between 2020 and 2025, a regional decline of 2.9 percent. That pace, if sustained, would consume the entirety of the 15 to 20 percent loss that state university demographers projected for the 2050 horizon by roughly 2040.
West Virginia’s coalfields are bearing the heaviest burden. McDowell County — which had nearly 100,000 residents in 1950 — now stands at 16,878. Mingo, Wyoming and Webster counties have all lost more than 7 percent of their populations in five years. Not one of West Virginia’s 16 Central Appalachian counties registered population growth over the period.
Kentucky’s deep coal counties — Breathitt, Leslie, Harlan, Letcher — are declining at annual rates that, if sustained, will reach the University of Kentucky’s projected 2050 losses well ahead of schedule. The one counterexample in the region that deserves attention is Tennessee, where all seven former coal counties grew, some substantially. Proximity to Knoxville and Oak Ridge has allowed those communities to absorb former coal workers into a more diversified regional economy. The lesson is worth examining by Southwest Virginia’s economic development planners, even if the geographic and infrastructure differences are significant.
A growing exception: the Hispanic community
Against the persistent backdrop of population loss, one demographic trend in Appalachia as a whole points in a different direction. The region’s Hispanic community is now the fastest-growing demographic group in Appalachia, estimated at 5 to 6 percent of the total regional population — up from a negligible presence in the 1980s. The growth has been most pronounced in Southern Appalachia, driven by employment in food processing, construction and light manufacturing.
The numbers in Virginia’s deep coalfield counties remain small, but the broader regional shift is real and accelerating. Understanding what draws Hispanic families to communities that the national narrative largely portrays as declining may offer insights that matter for the region’s longer-term demographic health.
The Weldon Cooper projections, five years in
In August 2025, the Weldon Cooper Center published updated population projections for Virginia showing that Buchanan County is expected to lose 48 percent of its then-current population by 2050. Dickenson County faces a projected 31 percent decline. Wise and Russell counties are each projected at 30 percent losses, Lee County at 28 percent, Tazewell at 26 percent.
Those projections were sobering when published. They are more so now. Five years into the decade, Buchanan is already down 9.1 percent from its 2020 baseline. If the annual rate of decline from the Vintage 2025 data persists, Buchanan reaches the 48 percent threshold not in 2050 but sometime in the late 2030s.
What the Vintage 2025 data cannot tell us is whether the structural forces driving the decline — the age of the population, the absence of large-scale economic alternatives, the decades-long attrition of institutions — are amenable to reversal at any realistic policy scale. The Weldon Cooper demographers themselves noted that the projections assume current trends continue, and that people could begin moving to the region if conditions changed. That qualification stands. But five years of actuals tracking ahead of the projections is not an encouraging sign that the conditions have changed.
James Branscome is a journalist and author who has covered Appalachia for five decades. He writes for Cardinal News, the Kentucky Lantern, West Virginia Watch, and the Daily Yonder. He is a native of Carroll County, a former staff member at the Appalachian Regional Commission, and a retired managing director of Standard and Poor’s. He can be reached through his Substack at substack.com/@jbranx.
Data note:
All population figures are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau’s CO-EST2025-alldata file (Vintage 2025 Population Estimates), released March 2026.
Five-year change figures compare the July 1, 2025 estimate to the April 1, 2020 census base. All computations are the author’s own.
County definitions follow the ARC’s original 1965 Central Appalachia designation.
