BURRILLVILLE - If you transplanted New Hampshire's Great North Woods to Rhode Island, the result might very well be Burrillville.

On a recent day, a farmer here swayed in a rocking chair as he bellyached about the pace of business at his roadside stand.

Across town, Paul Bunyan-like men sauntered into a pizza parlor weighing the merits of various four-wheel-drive vehicles. When a waitress greeted them with a friendly "Hello, men," one barked back, "You better call us men."

Down the road, a rusty truck leaving the Mad Dog Saloon bore a tiny Confederate flag and the bumper sticker Mad Dogs Rule the Road!

And at Wayne's Place — aka NASCAR Heaven — shoppers selected from the finest in both Dale Earnhardt memorabilia and live bait.

"We did a survey and found that the same person who fishes has an 85-percent chance of being a NASCAR fan," explained the store owner, Wayne Barber. And what sort of person might that be? "A white male between 30 and 50 years old — that about covers it."

That about covers Burrillville.

Through the 1990s, Rhode Island underwent some striking demographic changes. Its Hispanic and black populations soared; its coastal towns bulged; and residents of Providence's inner cities dispersed into the once-white suburbs.

But in some places around the state, these population shifts might as well have occurred on another planet. Places like Foster and North Smithfield, Portsmouth and Warren. And Burrillville.

A VAST tract of woodland in the northwestern corner of Rhode Island, Burrillville is almost exactly the same today as it was a decade ago. The 2000 census put its population at 15,796; in 1990, it was 16,230. And the town remains nearly 98-percent non-Hispanic white — in a virtual dead heat with Little Compton for the title of whitest municipality in Rhode Island.

The French-Canadian and Irish ancestries of many of its residents also assures a religious monochrome, with Roman Catholic churches serving as what one resident calls the town's "glue."

"The first time I ran, I got every Jewish vote in town," jokes Louis Bleiweis, 86, a retired newspaper manager who is Jewish and was elected to the Town Council in 1994.

"You know how many that is? Five."

Barber, of Wayne's Place, who is 50, says that like most of the other residents, he has never so much as flirted with leaving. Why should he? The opening day of trout season finds grandfathers, sons, and grandchildren lining up at his store to buy fishing licenses together.

And when two Reservoir Road houses burned down last summer, the neighbors threw a spaghetti-and-meatball fundraiser to rebuild them.

"It's a little quieter way of life, but it's a better way of life," said Barber, a fourth-generation Burrillville resident, peering out from his Dale Earnhardt cap on a slow afternoon. "It's the only part of the state where you can still go skinny-dipping and not get caught."

PROFESSIONALS from Providence, Worcester, and Boston have discovered in Burrillville a still-rural suburb: some hulking new houses have risen along the town's snaking roads. But in most ways, the town looks as it has always looked.

Oaks and evergreens carpet its softly rolling hills. Laundry flutters behind modest houses. Asphalt gives way to lumpy dirt roads, dotted with jury-rigged trailers, rusting farm equipment, neck-high piles of fresh firewood, and No Trespassing signs. Tractors, pickup trucks, and horse trailers still outflank the occasional BMW or sport-utility vehicle.

At the Wallum Lake Rod & Gun Club, the members fire shotguns at pheasants and sling arrows at plastic likenesses of black bears and wild turkeys.

Package stores — the biggest, decorated with a model of an old-style still, is Moonshine Liquors — are the dominant business in Burrillville's closest thing to a downtown; Budweiser, the dominant beer.

In land mass, the town is one of the state's largest, with its 56 square miles fanning out to both Connecticut and Massachusetts. Yet it is also one of the most inward-looking. People mailing letters at the central post office, in Pascoag, must choose between two mailboxes: Pascoag and Out of Pascoag.

"It's a local box," says Leo Toher, postmaster, of the former. "Whatever comes out of that stays in the town."

FROM A BRICK building just about dead-center in Burrillville, Police Chief Bernard Gannon maintains order in a community where "on the loose" is more apt to refer to a horse than a hoodlum.

Heading the most-wanted list is a first-time offender charged with possessing stolen Corvette engines.

The most common serious crime, says the chief, is child molestation. Mostly, though, his 25-officer force deals with what he calls quality-of-life "issues" — speeding, loud music, loitering, mailbox smashing.

The nearest thing to murder are the bodies that occasionally turn up in Burrillville's woods — bodies that prove to have been transported over town lines.

While big-city police are learning how to analyze crime scenes for DNA evidence, Burrillville officers are learning "verbal judo" — how to defuse hostile encounters with residents.

"Burrillville is like living in Providence in the '50s," says Gannon, who became police chief after retiring as Providence's chief, in 1995. "There's one bank, one credit union, one market. The alarm goes off at the bank — there's no mystery where you're going."

FOR DECADES, students at Burrillville High School spent four years in English classes that focused on white-male authors in the American and British canon. But about six years ago, some of the newer teachers started to worry that the school was out of step with other Rhode Island high schools.

So on a recent Wednesday morning, the topic in Anne Blissmer's 12th-grade class was Things Fall Apart, a novel by African author Chinua Achebe that deals with such difficult themes as tribal superstition, suicide, and British colonialism.

The students struggle with the names (one calls the protagonist Okinawa, instead of Okonkwo). But with Blissmer's help, they grope to understand a culture that is a hundred years and thousands of miles away from Burrillville.

"I don't really get this evil-forest thing," sighs one boy. "Is it part of the village?"

Blissmer, who like her students is white, is a Chicago native who moved to Rhode Island two years ago. She says that helping Burrillville students relate to African culture has been a challenge.

For some of her charges, even the University of Illinois sticker on her classroom door is exotic; Blissmer has had to remind them that the s in Illinois is silent.

"My students are so — for the most part — sheltered that they think diversity means going to Woonsocket," says Blissmer. "I tell them, 'You need to realize there are people beyond Burrillville and beyond America that are different.' "

One of her students, Jenn Robillard, can't recall the play her class saw last year at Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence. But her memory is fresh of her classmates' reaction to the racially diverse Cranston students they sat next to:

"When we saw those kids from Cranston, all these kids [from Burrillville] were like 'Oh my God!' They were completely shocked — like they had never seen this before."

In 1996, racial tensions erupted in a brawl at a high-school soccer match in Burrillville, after the residents hurled racist slurs at a team from Central Falls.

But some Burrillville students say that what the town lacks in ethnic diversity, it makes up for in other kinds of diversity. Felicia Perez's family left Bellingham, Mass., two years ago for a bigger house here. The 10th grader says that though Bellingham had more Hispanics — her father is Puerto Rican — she has had an easier time being an individual in Burrillville.

"Here," she says, "there are the skateboarders, the jocks, the cheerleader types, the metal-heads, the rapper-gangster wannabes, the brainiacs, and sort of like the loner types. In Bellingham, it was just the cheerleaders and jocks."

Some Burrillville people get defensive when asked about their attitudes toward the outside world. They say that they, too, have suffered prejudice. "Hicks, hicks, go back to the sticks!" went a chant once popular with rival sports teams. Some would taunt the Burrillville athletes by ringing cowbells.

IN RHODE ISLAND, Hispanics and racial minorities now make up about 18 percent of the population.

In Burrillville — as in Little Compton, North Smithfield, and Glocester — that proportion has barely cracked 2 percent. This is not unusual in northern-New England towns far from urban centers. But these southern-New England towns are a half-hour drive from Providence, the region's second-largest city and one of its most diverse.

Over the 1990s, Burrillville gained 61 Hispanic residents, for a total of 132; it gained 17 black residents, for a total of 34; and 13 Asians, for a total of 34.

Most Burrillville residents say that their town is simply too far off the interstates and has too few jobs to attract minorities. There are blacks and Hispanics on the waiting list for the town's subsidized-housing vouchers; but the list moves slowly, and when their turns come up, usually they have found housing elsewhere, or else they back out upon learning exactly where Burrillville is.

"They'll say, 'We want to get out into the country,'" says Maureen Guilbault, executive director of the Burrillville Housing Authority. "But they don't really mean the real country — they mean North Providence country."

Over the 1990s, no complaints of racial discrimination in Burrillville were filed with the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights.

Still, some Burrillville residents say that a distrust of outsiders persists here, dating from the town's earliest days.

Almost from its creation, in 1806, Burrillville was a town divided. Its textiles mills, which churned out worsted wool for Civil War uniforms — and thrived well into the 1950s — balkanized its landscape into distinct villages. Each mill spawned a self-sufficient community, the workplace surrounded by the workers' houses, church, and school.

To this day, longtime residents are less likely to say they're from Burrillville than from one of its villages: Harrisville, Pascoag, Bridgeton, Mohegan, Mapleville, and many more.

"I lived in Pascoag, and we didn't even meet the kids from Harrisville until we graduated from eighth grade and went to high school together," says Patricia A. Mehrtens, 67, a writer and the town's appointed historian. Her high-school boyfriend, who was from Harrisville, had to sneak over to see her, lest he receive a drubbing from the Pascoag bullies.

Members of the volunteer fire companies looked askance at their counterparts in neighboring villages. When the rivalries heated up, they'd gather on bridges for old-fashioned fistfights.

Even the town's water crisis — the gasoline additive MTBE was recently found in Pascoag water — has piqued provincial sentiments. A proposed solution involving a merger between the Pascoag Utility District and the Harrisville water system led the Pascoag utility's general manager, Theodore G. Garille, to declare the need to "put down parochial barriers."

The merger would bring clean water to 1,200 Pascoag residents forced for weeks to drink state-supplied bottled water. But that seems to offer no guarantee of the merger's success.

"They take great pride in their Harrisville fire district, and we take great pride in the Pascoag Utility District," says Garille, anticipating a possible stumbling block. "One would hope this particular situation" — undrinkable tap water — "would cause doors to be opened and issues to be re-examined."

With the village-defining mills gone now, some parochial barriers have indeed started to come down. The fire companies now all train and play softball together; the middle schools draw from a mix of neighborhoods (no one blinks when love blooms between Pascoag and Harrisville); and Town Council members are elected at large, rather than from districts.

Even so, many townspeople have yet to relinquish a suspiciousness toward outsiders — even the outsider who gave Burrillville its name. A recent proposal to turn a patch of grass into a memorial for James Burrill Jr., a distinguished U.S. senator, imploded amid objections that he had never actually lived here.

"He was a foreigner, as far as I'm concerned," Town Councilman Edward Bonczek said during a debate in September.

The head of the local historical society, Mark St. Pierre, walked away crestfallen and a little stunned. "I'm sorry I ever brought it up," he said.

TWO HOUSES set unassumingly uphill from Pascoag are the only places in Burrillville with any concentration of minorities. Run by Tanner Hill, a state-financed organization, the houses are home to 16 5- to 12-year-olds deemed too difficult to live with foster parents.

Eight of the 16 are black — making up nearly a quarter of the town's black population. In the public schools, their faces are often the only ones of color.

"It's a challenge, because these kids already feel different," says Kate Butler, a child-care worker at Tanner Hill, alluding to the neglect and abuse that led to their separation from their biological parents.

Not long ago, says Butler, a black third grader returned from school yearning for the flowing straight hair and ponytails of the white girls in her class.

"This child was constantly concerned about her hairstyles," says Butler. "No matter what she did with her hair, she was made fun of."

Another of the Tanner Hill girls, says Butler, was called a "slave" by a white classmate.

Tanner Hill's new executive director, Clark Lamboy, has tried to make the black children feel more at home. He has hung African art on the walls and stocked the bookshelves with stories about African Americans. Once he drove to Providence to get the collard greens a girl had requested for her birthday dinner.

JAN E. HAYES, 40, who is black, wouldn't mind seeing a few more minorities in Burrillville.

She and her two children moved here four years ago, from St. Petersburg, Fla., with her companion, a white man who had family in Rhode Island.

She says she has encountered little bigotry here, but plenty of double takes.

"I got a couple of looks," says Hayes, a nurse's aide at Zambarano Hospital, in town. "It wasn't like 'What are you doing here?' type looks. It was more like 'Oh, oh, my goodness — that's a black person.' "

She rents an apartment in Pascoag that has become a kind of gathering place for the neighborhood kids. "My house is almost like a YMCA," she jokes. But she and her sons — Eric, 14, and C.J., 17 — miss Florida, where her parents live and where a wider social circle includes blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites.

Hayes likes Burrillville's friendly residents, and its small-town familiarity, but she agrees when her sons call it Boringville.

"Up here, you're just kind of stuck," she says.

This will be Hayes's last year here. With her companion no longer in the picture and her younger son clamoring for city life, she plans to return to St. Petersburg.

"There's no black people up here," the 14-year-old has told her. "I want to be around more black people."

SITTING in a rocking chair at his farm stand on a chilly October day, Donald F. Smith, 43, confesses that the farthest he has ever strayed from home is Maine. He traveled there once to see Burrillville High School's storied hockey team win the New England championship.

"Donny's never been too far out of Pascoag," says his mother, Evelyn Smith, 66.

A beefy man with dirt-caked work boots, Smith doesn't contradict her. "I've never been anywhere my whole life," he says.

Burrillville, with its serenity and its nice people, is all Donald Smith has ever wanted.

In the 1930s, his grandfather would milk the cows and deliver the milk by horse and buggy. Later, with just a pickup truck and a wooden plank, his parents cleared boulders off their 18 acres and planted apple trees.

Smith has worked the farm his whole life. But the last two years have been trying, with a drought and then a springtime freeze killing much of the apple harvest — little apple picking meant that Smith gained 30 pounds, he says. More serious, he's still got payments to make on his pesticide sprayer.

Yet Smith has no plans to sell the farm to the developers who come knocking. When his father died, two years ago, his mother wanted to do just that. But then she deeded the farm to her son.

Says Donald: "I could never turn my back on my parents. If I were to walk away, this place would go right under."

KAREN G. HUNDLEY has gotten out, for now.

"When I was growing up," she says, "it was like 'Oh God, I can't wait to get out of Burrillville — there's got to be something else.'"

So she went to college in Ohio, and stayed.

As a girl in Burrillville, Hundley found the routine confining. The same high-school games on Friday and Saturday nights . . . the teen hockey stars everyone worshipped . . . the social gatherings in convenience-store parking lots . . . and lots of beer drinking — in cars, in the woods, wherever.

"Drinking tended to pass the time," says Hundley, 29, a former buyer for Texas Instruments, now becoming a teacher. "I think it was more of a boredom thing — 'Let's drink and get drunk and be stupid.' "

She and her friends called Burrillville "the black hole": "It would suck you in, and you couldn't get out."

When Hundley and the others who left Burrillville now visit their parents, she says, they can predict the types of people they will see. One type can be found on a barstool — the former high-school sports hero, now in his 30s or 40s, still living in town, still wearing his letter jacket.

But, strangely, Hundley says that she has started to feel a faint tug from "the black hole."

The feeling arose after she had her first child, seven months ago. The "typical suburb" that she and her husband live in, outside Columbus, Ohio, lacks Burrillville's endless woods and fields, where kids can ride bikes, whack a baseball, play Army amidst the trees. Nor are there skating ponds. And it's not safe enough to leave the doors unlocked.

"Before," says Hundley, "I said I would never live in Burrillville. Now that I have a daughter, it's like I'm starting to get nostalgic."

— With reports from staff writer David Herzog

Digital Extra: Read previous monthly census reports:

http://projo.com/news/ census/