TREECE, Kan.  Mayor Bill Blunk sees no reason for sugar-coating his opinion when asked to describe this town.

“It’s dead,” he said. “Wasted land.”

Almost anywhere else on the map, such bluntness could cost a politician re-election. But not here. Mr. Blunk has the near-unanimous support of the population, 140 people or so, who are perhaps singular among residents of municipalities in that they all want out of theirs.

“I’d be happy to go as anyone,” said Randall Barr, a retired sand company worker. “You can’t do anything with this land. What good is it?”

For most of the early part of the 20th century, this little city in the southeast corner of Kansas had the feel of a rollicking boom town, its prosperity coming from land rich in lead, zinc and iron ore. Part of a vast mining district where Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma meet, Treece and its twin city across the Oklahoma state line, Picher, became the unofficial capitals of a zone that in its heyday produced more than $20 billion worth of ore  much of it used for weaponry to fight World Wars I and II.