Residents of the small town of Sherman, Conn., have joined the ranks of retirees to a remarkable extent since about 20 years ago.
Flip back to the year 2009. Barack Obama had just been inaugurated as president, the American economy was still limping through the Great Recession, and the first iteration of Minecraft had just been released to the public.
In Connecticut, the small town of of Sherman was wrapping up a five-year period during which the Census Bureau estimated it had nearly 1,000 residents of high school age or younger. Just under 600 residents in that period were 65 or older.
Accelerate to 2024, and the numbers flip. The most recently available five-year estimates for the town put the number of children at fewer than 500. Its population of seniors aged 65 and over, meanwhile, doubled.
In 2024, the median age of residents was 60, 14 years older than it had been during the period that ended 15 years prior. The town also shrank, shedding more than 500 of its original 4,000 residents.
Sherman isn't the oldest town in the state. If you measure in the manner we did, using the share of a town which is 65 and older, then that honor is held by Sharon, in Litchfield County. (If you measure by residents aged 75 and older, the town of Old Saybrook ranks first.)
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But it is leading a cohort of towns where demographics have shifted rapidly, especially relative to Connecticut as a whole. Sherman's senior population share has grown nearly four times as much as the state overall. Another 40 Connecticut towns changed similarly, seeing their share of 65-and-older residents grow by at least 10 percentage points. The most populous of those towns were the shoreline enclaves of Branford, Guilford and East Lyme.
The context for all of this isn’t much of a mystery. The peak year of the baby boom, the post-World-War-II period which saw a surge in births, occurred in 1957. In 2022, a person born in that year would have turned 65.
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What's happened in Sherman, in other words, has happened just about everywhere else, to a varying degree. Really, there are only a handful of Connecticut towns which haven’t seen growth in their senior population share. Salisbury, for example, became a post-COVID destination for those fleeing New York City, CT Insider reported in August, swelling the size of its working-age population.
“I think Sherman is really following suit with the entire nation,” Don Lowe, the town’s first selectman, said in a phone interview. “It’s just that we’re a little more pronounced than the average.”
As they get older, towns like Sherman often see workers transition to retirees. In our 2009 to 2024 timeframe, Sherman lost nearly 600 working-age residents. Lowe acknowledged that young families don’t tend to move into the town unless they’re already “upwardly mobile," a nod to the town’s high home values. The median home in the town cost around $500,000 in 2024.
The town used to have four-and-a-half working age residents for every senior. Now it has fewer than two, the data shows.
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Only the town of Willington, a suburb near Storrs, saw a steeper reversal in the ratio of seniors to children. Nearly a quarter of residents in that town are now 65 or older, up from just 6% in 2009.
Lowe said the demographic changes are always top of mind for Sherman's future. That’s why residents are slated to receive a $4.5 million senior center, Lowe said, an upgrade to a current facility which he described as “woefully inadequate.”
“Maybe life is so good here that people live a long time,” joked Lowe. “Who knows."