MORLAND, Kan. — As a lawyer in this little town, Jerry Helberg does just about everything. He settles estates, writes contracts and wills, prepares tax returns and handles the rare small crime. Mr. Helberg is Morland's only lawyer. At 63, he is also probably its last, for this town is getting smaller by the year.

Mr. Helberg's three grown children, all graduates of Morland High School, have moved away.

"There was no place here for them to take a job and make a living," he said. "Every one of them would come back if there was a job here."

Morland, population 164, down from 234 in the 1990 census, sits squarely in the path of a decline that the 2000 census found sweeping through the small towns of the Great Plains. While the nation's population grew 13 percent in the 1990's, the Census Bureau found that 676 of the nation's 3,141 counties lost people.

Most of the decline was in wheat, ranching and oil country in Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota and the Dakotas. In Kansas, for example, there are now more "frontier counties" — defined by the census as having from two to six people per square mile — than there were in 1890.

Graham County, which includes Morland, lost 17 percent of its population, which fell to 2,946 in the last decade. Within 50 miles of Morland, fading towns settled more than a century ago — like Zurich, Palco, Jennings, Clayton and Dresden — lost 15 percent to 30 percent of their inhabitants. In many places, headstones outnumber mailboxes 10 and 20 to 1.

The population of the Great Plains peaked in the 1930's, but many communities throughout the Plains had been losing people for nearly a century. Demographers spotted some recovery at the start of the 90's.

"In the early 90's there was some hope for what demographers call a population rebound," said Leonard Bloomquist, director of the Population Research Laboratory at Kansas State University in Manhattan. But those hopes quickly sank as water shortages impeded growth and as chain stores like Kmart and Wal-Mart opened in towns, helping them grow but draining business from smaller communities with stores that could not compete.

A town does not vanish in a single moment. Nor does it vanish for a single reason. In Morland's case, the decline was brought on by the mechanization of agriculture and nearly two decades of low wheat prices and shrinking oil fields.

The staples of the community fell away one by one. The Union Pacific Railroad pulled out in the mid-1990's; the tracks were pulled up a couple of years ago. The Methodist church lost its full-time pastor, so the parsonage, built in the 1970's, is rented out. Over the years, Morland has lost its opera house, one of two banks, its two-story hotel, the pool hall, its weekly newspaper, its lumber yard, its three gasoline stations, its automobile dealership, three clothing stores, the shoe store and two of three grocery stores.

In 1973, the town lost its furniture, hardware and mortuary businesses at once when Joe and Jane Nichols, who ran all three, died. The hardest loss will come on Saturday, when Morland High will graduate its last class and close its doors.

What is left is on increasingly unstable ground. Houses that remain sturdy are often close to worthless.

"How do you sell houses to people that aren't here?" asked Fred Pratt, Graham County's main real estate agent. In the county seat, Hill City, he said, "Most of my houses are in the $20,000 to $30,000 range."

Mark E. Niehaus, the county appraiser, said the assessed value of property dropped to $25.5 million last year, from $36.6 million in 1989.

Lana Barton, 32, a divorced mother of two, moved to Morland two years ago to be closer to her parents. She bought a four-bedroom house on Main Street.

"I paid $13,000 for it," Ms. Barton said. "It's a nice house, too."

But her plans exclude Morland. She is studying in Hays, an hour away, to be a teacher and expects to work away from Graham County.

"I send my children to school in Hill City," she said. "It's a bigger school, with more going on."

The rolling prairie and pasture around Morland are bound by telephone lines and barbed wire, with outcroppings of sandy yellowish shale. Every two or three miles along Graham County's packed dirt roads, stands an empty farmhouse, its clapboard walls scraped of paint, its land rented or sold to big farmers. Occasionally the vista is broken by a rusty oil tank and drilling gear or the bones of a half-century-old tractor and other farm equipment. The roads, some paved, wear shifting layers of shale dust, which April storms whip into blistering fogs.

People do their best to get by. Fred Pratt runs farm auctions and sells real estate and used cars.

"We like living here," Mr. Pratt said. "It's a beautiful place. The only thing we don't like, you can't make any money to survive. My son is getting straight A's. He's not going to be around here."

Patty Minium Bean's father settled here in 1901 and became mayor. Her mother opened the Minium Dry Goods store on Main Street in 1958. Although it loses money, Mrs. Bean keeps it open, selling boots, overalls, zippers, thread and fabric.

"I should close it, but I just don't," Mrs. Bean said.

Her husband, Robert, 70, owns Bean's Country Store at Main and Tiger Streets, the latter named for the school's mascot, a fighting tiger. After school, until a couple of years ago, "the store would fill up with kids," said Faye E. Minium, president of Citizens State Bank on Main Street. "It doesn't anymore."

With the shuttering of Morland High, it is not likely to fill up again. The beginning of the end for Morland's combined high school and junior high came last July. Shelly Swayne, 27, the principal, waited for students to come in to talk about courses and sports for the next year.

"We kept waiting for people to walk in the door, and they never came," Ms. Swayne said. Days later, she said, "other schools started requesting our students' academic and health records."

A school that had graduated 20 to 30 students a decade ago opened this school year with just 19 high school students, an eighth grader and a seventh grader. Sports had to be discontinued, and students were sent to join Hill City High School's teams.

After some parents made clear that they would not enroll their children next fall, Morland's school board surveyed the remaining parents and found even more had decided to send their children to other schools, so the board voted in April to close the school. The elementary school with 30 pupils, an average of about four in each class, has been spared for a year.

"You shut your school and you take some of your identity away," said Todd Toll, 43, a home remodeler and chairman of the school board.

Terry Allison, 40, associate director of the Graham County United Methodist Parish who preaches here on alternate Sundays, said losing the school shook his few parishioners.

"They're proud to live where they are," Mr. Allison said. "But they feel they can't do anything to replenish what they had."

The school's closing is also shaking the economy. Last year, before the latest plunge in enrollment, Mr. Bean sold the school district $1,000 a week in food. This year he is selling it $500. Next year, he might get $350 from the grade school, then nothing.

For all that, the pioneer spirit still glows. Morland's residents take pride in their smart children and imperceptible crime rate. They relish their customs, like ham and eggs on Sunday night at Hill City's Western Hills Restaurant, their traffic- free roads and hunting wild turkeys and ringneck pheasants and fishing in Antelope Lake.

People are also doing their best to survive. Faye Minium's bank has opened branches in Hill City and WaKeeney, 25 miles south of Morland. With 800 checking accounts, almost five times the population of Morland, the bank has been growing about 15 percent a year, Ms. Minium said. She is also organizing a museum in a renovated bank building to draw tourists to Morland.

"You have to be somewhat of a pioneer to live here," she said.

Mr. Bean is reaching out, too. He persuaded small grocers in the region to combine their orders so they can get the volume discounts that wholesalers offer supermarkets, and he delivers the groceries to them.

Still, with downtowns boarded up and shopping strips struggling, the tide of flight from Graham County may be impossible to turn.

But interviews with six of Morland High's eight juniors and seniors revealed fiercely loyal Morland Tigers. Kyle Lemon, a junior who was sent last year to play for Hill City High's teams, said, "I still felt like a Tiger, even if I had to wear the red shirt" of the Hill City Ringnecks.

Georgann Meier, a cheerleader and hurdler whose mother owns the town's beauty salon and whose father works at the grain elevator, said of the school's closing: "I didn't want this to happen. You learn more at a small school. You can't hide."

But in their own aspirations, the school's final classes may be writing Morland's epitaph. Seven of the eight are children of farming families, but not one plans to become a farmer or to live in Morland.

Ms. Meier is going to a junior college across the state in Kansas City and then perhaps to a university.

"I will probably live in a small town, but not in Morland, Kan.," she said. "I'll probably come back when I retire, maybe."

Becky Ellis, 47, the music and special education teacher, is the third generation of her family to graduate from Morland High. She is the wife of a Morland farmer, and they sent their three children to Morland schools. The two older children have gone on to the University of Kansas.

"Kids here are able to go as far as they can go," Mrs. Ellis said. But, she added, "I think the loss of the school is the beginning of the end of this community."