continued to grow, to hit an all-time peak in 1826 of 578. There was talk of enlarging the church again. In the event, the church was not enlarged which turned out to be prescient since the population now started to decline, and would be down by a third by the end of the century. The population decline of the nineteenth century was a widespread feature of rural France during the nineteenth century. Improvements in transport made villages less vulnerable to localised famines and improved health in the countryside probably improved resistance to disease. However, industrialisation and the growth of commerce in, especially, Alsace and the Paris and Lyon regions enticed the more ambitious country dwellers to move into the cities, drawn by the lure of higher wages and the perception of better prospects. Emigration to Frances's overseas territories and North America also played their part in depleting the population of rural Lorraine. Contemporaries also pointed to a decline in family size, although this was to some extent off-set by a decline in infant mortality in the rural parishes. It seemed that the dawn of the twentieth century might usher in an end to this decline, with the establishment in 1902 of a glass factory at nearby Gironcourt offering a significant number of jobs at factory level wages at a time when agricultural incomes remained depressed, as they had since the 1870s since when a succession of improvements in transport and preservation techniques had increasingly exposed European agriculture to competition from north and South America. The Gironcourt factory did indeed lead to a resurgence in the population of La Neuveville where formerly abandoned houses were reoccupied by workers moving in from outside the village. See also Communes of the Vosges department References Communes of Vosges (department)