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2000 – 2020
Twice in twenty years the town's census count moved as if a different town had been counted. The banked spine prints the figures and flags them, offering no explanation because none was found in a reached source: from 1,402 in 2000 to 1,896 in 2010, a rise of 494 people, +35.2 percent, the largest rise in the series after 1880, following a decade of +2.6 percent; then from 1,896 in 2010 to 1,623 in 2020, a fall of 273, −14.4 percent, the largest decline in the series, in the same decade in which the town's published land area rose from 0.98 to 1.04 square miles. A second, divergent set of figures also circulates in compilations — 1,445 for 2000 among them — and prints whole in the Story of North Liberty section, unmerged with the Census Bureau's series. The town's own site, the Story of North Liberty section notes, still carried the framing that the population "has increased with every census since 1980": true through 2010, and superseded by the 2020 return. Both the jump and the fall stand unexplained in every carrier reached; any retelling that explains them is inventing.