Off the top of the headcount

When the Census Bureau puts out its annual estimates, the wire services report on maybe the top 100 cities, and local papers concentrate on the town in which they're published. But the complete "subcounty" list is an enormous spreadsheet (about 7 megabytes) which breaks down each state by county, and then each county by municipality or whatever therein.

Oklahoma City spills into three counties, and there's a tiny sliver in a fourth. In the Sixties, there was a fifth — McClain — but that area was eventually deannexed and now belongs to Newcastle. The 2005 estimate for OKC, just released, was 531,324, up 4624 from the revised 2004 count of 526,700, and here's how they're distributed:

Canadian County: 32,536, up 1511.
Cleveland County: 52,039, up 632.
Oklahoma County: 446,678, up 2477.
Pottawatomie County: 71, up 4.

The Cleveland County section of the city is still larger than Moore (47,697), but Moore is growing faster these days and may catch up by 2010.

Elsewhere among the numbers:

• The town of Fanshawe, in Latimer County, is unchanged since the 2000 Census: the population remains at 0. (Hoot Owl, in Mayes County, which started the decade at 0, is now apparently up to 1; it was 5 back in 1990.)

• I knew that there was a sizable chunk of Tulsa in Osage County; I had not realized that there is also a section in Wagoner County, apparently annexed in the past decade, with a population of 226 (up 29 from 2004), and another in Rogers County, population 3.

• Rather a lot of municipalities straddle county lines: for instance, 244 of Okarche's 1158 people live, not in Kingfisher County, but in Canadian County. A lot of this I'd attribute to fencelining.
  

Fascinating things, these numbers.

Posted at 9:05 AM to Soonerland