Baldwin County, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, added forty seven thousand people to grow to more than two hundred thousand residents. Baldwin grew faster than all of the state's other 66 counties over the decade, boosting its population by nearly 26%.
Alabama Public Radio began covering Baldwin County's population boom back in 2015. Back then, the county’s probate Judge, Tim Russell had a theory when it comes to the migration of families to Baldwin. They come to visit for vacation and like it so much, they want to stay.
“And I hear the story all the time,” said Russell in 2015. “They come down for two or three years to the condos, waters, bays, rivers. They fall in love. They say, I want to get down there and be part of it. So our greatest growth is in the retiree population.”
And a study by Georgia Southern University, APR reported in 2015, shows this trend has been going on for a while. It says, between 1980 and 2005, Baldwin’s retiree population jumped by two hundred percent. Baldwin County is home to the state's largest beach communities and towns along Mobile Bay's eastern shore. Al.com reports that new estimates released by the Census Bureau show that with a population that dropped by 5,000 people to 225,000 in 2020, Montgomery County is now the fifth-largest county in the state behind Baldwin.
