It would be easy to call the evaporation of factory jobs from small towns merely the continuation of a longtime trend, but that would gloss over the recent past.

From 1991 to 1998, rural communities gained about 155,000 factory jobs, according to the Center for the Study of Rural America, based at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

While metropolitan areas also gained manufacturing jobs during the period, the 3.3 percent increase in rural factory employment outpaced the urban increase on a percentage basis.

The backslide began slowly during the late '90s. But rural manufacturing centers have really felt the bite from 2000 to the present.

Last year, 25 percent of the jobs lost in urban manufacturing were the result of outright factory shutdowns. But in rural communities, 45 percent of all manufacturing jobs were the casualties of plant closures.

Urban centers lost 8.9 percent of their factory jobs between 1998 and the end of last year. But rural towns have lost 13.4 percent of their manufacturing employment--572,000 jobs, according to the Kansas City center.

The slump has multiple roots.

Businesses that buy many of the goods made in U.S. factories stopped investing in new equipment. Several years of a strong U.S. dollar have made it even more enticing for manufacturers to shift production overseas. At plants that stayed open, tough times spurred operators to squeeze more products out of fewer workers.

"It's pretty bleak, and [the lost manufacturing jobs] are not coming back," said Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist with Economy.com, a West Chester, Pa., forecasting firm.

Many shutdowns have hit company towns long tied to single manufacturers, often in aging plants. Economists cite North Carolina--which has lost nearly 97,000 factory jobs, or 12 percent of its total, between mid-2000 and the end of last year--as something of a poster child for those changes.

The state, whose small towns have long been home to numerous labor-intensive textile, furniture and paper plants, has been walloped as more of those manufacturers move offshore.

Some communities saw the changes coming and worked to attract new businesses and help retrain workers to gradually make the shift.

But no one expected the departure of jobs to accelerate so quickly.

"Our system was designed around a normal speed of that transition, not phenomenal speed," says Billy Ray Hall, president of the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center in Raleigh. "What happens in warp speed is [workers] fall out of the bottom of the economy."