The skeletons of farmhouses stand in the fields just outside town, but the farmers who lived in them are long gone.

In town, the groceries and fertilizer stores they frequented are closed and abandoned. The school where they sent their children stands empty. The population shrinks each year.

A few months ago, some residents decided that the situation in Eureka, a northern Wayne County town, had gotten so bad that the only solution was to give up on being a town altogether. They got together a petition asking the General Assembly to dissolve the town's charter.

"Nobody wants to live here," said Luther Mozingo, who has lived in Eureka 30 years. "Why would anyone want to pay the taxes? We ain't even got a policeman."

But Mozingo discovered it's nearly impossible to disband a functioning town. Even with fewer than 250 residents, the town has big obligations: an aging sewer system, streets and sidewalks, street lights, a cemetery.

State leaders say Eureka is caught in a paradox that is strangling many of North Carolina's rural communities, as the farms and factories that sustained them disappear. The smaller and more impoverished a town becomes, the more its responsibilities grow.

More than 40 percent of the state's 543 municipalities lost population since 2000, according to a 2003 census estimate. As young people leave, an increasingly elderly population bears town expenses.

Solutions for these problems are hard to find. The state could help these towns pay local bills, but that's an uncertain proposition in a time of chronic state budget shortfalls.

"Governor Easley often talks about the two North Carolinas, and this is part of what he means," said Ellis Hankins, executive director of the N.C. League of Municipalities, which lobbies for local governments. "For some of these municipalities, there is no apparent ideal solution."

Sewer system woes

Eureka, about 75 miles southeast of Raleigh, had 239 people in 2003. The population has been falling since since 1980, when there were 303 residents.

The proud house where the town doctor once lived is abandoned at the center of town. The shells of former businesses stand nearby. A year and a half ago, the last grocery store closed. "This business for sale," reads the handwritten sign in the window.

Many of the young people have left for bigger places. The median age rose from 36 in 1980 to 45 in 2000, according to the census.

Town leaders can list only two additions in recent years: an expanded cemetery and a private care home for the sick.

The town has shed every expense possible. A few years ago, it sold its water system to a regional authority. It closed its police department and contracted with the sheriff's department.

It couldn't get rid of its biggest problem: an ailing sewer system.

Last year, the town abandoned its old-fashioned lagoons and started sending its sewage to nearby Fremont for treatment. Town officials didn't realize until too late that the leaky system was taking in thousands of gallons of rainwater, which meant they had to pay to treat far more water than residents actually use.

The town collects about $3,000 a month from its 115 sewer customers, Town Clerk Reta Chase said. Last month, the bill from Fremont was $11,000. Eureka's debt keeps climbing. The only way to pay it would be to quadruple already-high sewer rates.

A recent study by the N.C. Rural Economic Development Commission shows that the state will need $15 billion to cover its water and sewer needs over the next 25 years. Sen. John Kerr, a Goldsboro Democrat who represents Eureka, said the state must step forward with money to help rural communities meet those needs.

Kerr introduced a bill this year that would give rural communities $15 million a year for water and sewer needs, but its prospects are dicey. "Until we put money into utilities in all of North Carolina," Kerr said, "we will not be one state."

Eureka leaders say they need a grant to fix their sewer system. Then, they say, they could become a bedroom community for Goldsboro, about 15 miles south.

They say the town is worth saving, but their reasons are rooted more in its past than its future.

"Our forefathers set this up," said Town Commissioner Myrtie Sauls. "They did a good job, and we have a beautiful little town. Why would we want to do away with it?"

Sauls says the community formed in the 1700s, when people on their way to the Colonial capital of New Bern, two counties east, would stop to rest their horses. Eventually, seven saloons sprang up.

Later, Eureka became a hub for local farmers. It was chartered in in 1879 and had a cotton gin and a cluster of general stores.

Natives say their parents would travel from their farms, tie up their horses under the stores' awnings and trade stories around potbellied stoves.

Search for sustenance

Mozingo says he doesn't want to pay town taxes for the sake of memories, and he says the town is incapable of solving its problems. In Eureka, no one even bothers to run for office, he said.

Since 1987, town voters have filled 24 seats in eight elections, but only 10 people have filed to run, according to the Wayne County Board of Elections. All of the other winners got their seats through write-in votes or appointments.

Even so, Mozingo said he has given up on dissolving Eureka.

"The people in this town can just go the way they want to go," Mozingo said. "They'll wake up one morning and realize there is no town, because there's people going out faster than they're coming in."

For now, Eureka will go on trying to survive.

Billy Ray Hall, president of the Rural Center, said his group will help the town pay for an engineer to diagnose the problems with its sewer system. But he wasn't sure what would sustain Eureka, and towns like it, into the future.

Some of the state's small towns will feed off their larger neighbors, he said. Others will find ways to lure tourists.

Some, he said, will fade away.

(Staff researcher David Raynor contributed to this report.)