For sale: Smallest town in the US
Baku, April 6 (AZERTAC). The smallest town in the United States will lose its long-time sole resident today when the outpost of Buford, Wyoming, is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The minimum bid for Buford, 10-plus acres with a convenience store-cum-petrol station situated between the capital city of Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming, is $100,000 (€76,500) for a sale to take place in town at noon local time.
Buford, along Interstate 80, is one of two tiny Western towns to be sold by owners whose spouses have died and whose adult children have moved on.
Pray, Montana, with a population of eight, is on the market for $1.4 million, a price estate agents claim is a steal for property just north of Yellowstone National Park in the scenic Paradise Valley.
Both communities sprang to life amid Western settlement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when railroads brought people, supplies and prosperity to frontier towns, some of which failed to flourish despite hype by land speculators.
"It`s a quintessentially American story, with westward expansion and land speculation so tightly entwined and towns that boom and bust," said Stephen Aron, professor of history at University of California, Los Angeles and chair of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center.
Don Sammons and his wife, Terry, set out from Los Angeles to a ranch near Buford in 1980 seeking a relaxed rural lifestyle.
More than three decades later, Mr Sammons is finally leaving and it is a departure attended as much by anticipation as sadness, he said. The 61-year-old mayor, owner and sole inhabitant of Buford intends to move to Colorado`s Front Range to live near his son.
The home of a one-time military fort designed to protect the building of the transcontinental railroad, the site in the 1860s could boast as many as 2,000 residents. The population dwindled when the fort moved to Laramie and the county seat changed from Buford to Cheyenne.
The area, known as Paradise Valley, once was home to cattle ranchers whose landholdings have since been carved into exclusive developments where celebrity neighbours include actor Jeff Bridges.
Pray, named for a Montana congressman, Charles N Pray, was purchased by the family of Walker`s late husband in 1953. Pray once relied for outside income on trains carrying passengers to Yellowstone and on a highway that was twice relocated, sidelining the small ranching community.
With no zoning, no covenants and no building restrictions, Pray could becoming anything from a religious retreat to an artists` colony, said Linda Niebur, broker with Mason and Morse Ranch Company, the Colorado estate agent marketing the town.
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