Missouri growth in 1990s tops every decade of century

JEFFERSON CITY, MO. -- The baby boom was big in Missouri. But with arrivals of senior citizens, Hispanics and other newcomers during the 1990s, Missouri's millennium boom was bigger.

The state recorded its largest decennial population growth of the 20th Century between 1990 and 2000, 9.3 percent, an increase fueled more by migration than births and deaths.

The Baby Boom decade of the 1950s saw 9.2 percent statewide population growth, when births outstripped any other decade.

But State Demographer Ryan Burson estimated that 286,000 Missouri residents moved into the state during the '90s, contrasted with about 210,000 net gain in population due to births and deaths.

"In a sense, this in-migration has a lot in common with Missouri's growth in the 1800s, which was due more to westward expansion than births and deaths," Burson said.

The '90s migration was notable for senior citizens retiring to the Ozarks region and for Hispanics settling in rural areas, raising their ranks in some county headcounts by hundreds of percentage points.

All of this gave Missouri a total resident population of 5,595,211 in the U.S. Census headcount as of April 2000. The U.S. population was 281,421,906, up 13.1 percent over the decade.

Missouri remains an overwhelmingly white state -- 84.9 percent of residents -- and blacks remain the second-largest minority group, 11.2 percent.