articles buying-a-town-guide https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/buying-a-town-guide articles buying-a-town-guide ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- Entire villages and towns for sale you can actually buy I'LL BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR - Why buy a house when you can own a town? Real-life property towns for sale you can You can own the houses, the streets, the banks, the taverns, the land, everything you can see. Perhaps it can become a commune, a tourist destination, or just a bizarre vacation home. But money alone might not guarantee the purchase of your dream town. ---------------------------------- articles buying-a-town-guide

---------------------------------- town for sale 11 Tiny Towns You Can Buy—Yes, Really Aside from being elected mayor, there's one other little-known way to get to run a town: Buy it. Think it's impossible? The “For Sale” signs on a number of great American municipalities prove otherwise. Just take a gander at these 11 entire towns you can buy … By Manasa Reddigari Pinterest Facebook Twitter Email Johnsonville, Connecticut 1/11 Johnsonville, Connecticut Founded in 1802, this former mill town and tourist hot spot was all but abandoned by the mid-1990s. In a bid to rescue the peaceful community and reopen its shuttered buildings, an independent church acquired the ghost town this past July for roughly $1.9 million. ================================================================================================================= Related: The Best Tiny Towns in Every State Photo: commons.wikimedia.org via John Phelan Cal-Nev-Ari, Nevada 2/11 Cal-Nev-Ari, Nevada You might need your reading glasses to find this 2.3-square-mile desert hamlet on a map of Nevada. But the tiny town––which is home to a casino, airstrip, and classic diner–– has been up for grabs since 2016 for $8 million. ================================================================================================================= Related: 10 U.S. Towns That Are Older Than America Photo: commons.wikimedia.org via Stan Shebs Tiller, Oregon 3/11 Tiller, Oregon Tiller, Oregon, has easy access to a national forest, stunning views of the South Umpqua River, and a larger-than-life view of the Cascade Range. The natural treasures of this abandoned 256-acre Pacific Northwest haunt can be yours for a mere $3.85 million. ================================================================================================================= Related: The 20 Best Mountain Towns in America Photo: flickr.com via Thomas Kriese - Hell, Michigan 4/11 Hell, Michigan Don't be fooled by the name. Hell, Michigan, is a veritable paradise that hosts 66 miles of hiking trails, fishing-friendly Hiland Lake, and an annual "Blessing of the Bikes" event. The peculiarly named town comes with a price tag of $900,000. ================================================================================================================= Related: The 22 Weirdest Town Names Ever Put on the Map Photo: commons.wikimedia.org via Sswonk Pray, Montana 5/11 Pray, Montana You'll need more than a prayer to nab the rights to this tiny town north of Yellowstone National Park. The five-acre community encompasses a mobile home park, a general store, and an office building––and it’s on the market for $1.4 million. ================================================================================================================= Related: 18 Small Towns with Strange Claims to Fame Photo: flickr.com via Mark Smith Henry River Mill Village, North Carolina 6/11 Henry River Mill Village, North Carolina If the eerily quiet, tree-lined streets of this Carolina town look familiar, it's because the formerly abandoned community served as the location of Katniss Everdeen's home in "The Hunger Games" film franchise. But fame comes at a cost—specifically $1.4 million, the 72-acre town's current asking price. ================================================================================================================= Related: 7 Fictional Towns You Can Visit in Real Life Photo: flickr.com via Steve Goodwin - Toomsboro, Georgia 7/11 Toomsboro, Georgia Founded in the 18th century, this postcard-worthy former railway town boasts a historic inn, a syrup mill, and a railroad depot. But there's no need to pick up a postcard to preserve your memory of the idyllic municipality with 700 inhabitants; you can buy it outright from the developer, who put it up for sale in 2012. ================================================================================================================= Related: 18 American Towns Every Old-House Lover Needs to See Photo: flickr.com via C Smith Garryowen, Montana 8/11 Garryowen, Montana Attention history buffs! You can stake your claim on the same turf where Colonel George Armstrong Custer unsuccessfully made his last stand against the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Garryowen, Montana, the site of the Sioux War's Battle of Little Bighorn, can be yours for just $250,000. ================================================================================================================= Related: The Most Famous Houses in Every State Photo: flickr.com via erik shin Scenic, South Dakota 9/11 Scenic, South Dakota Named after its spectacular setting in the center of Badlands National Park, Scenic fell into disrepair in the 21st century before it was finally put up for sale in 2011 for $799,000. The 12-acre town still bears intriguing vestiges of decades past, including an old saloon, a dance hall, and cowboy barracks. ================================================================================================================= Related: Endless Acres: 14 of the Biggest Properties in America Photo: flickr.com via orientalizing - Buford, Wyoming 10/11 Buford, Wyoming Paying a visit to this all-but-forgotten town north of the Rockies will double its population. If you want to make the town's gas station and town hall your own and provide permanent company for the area's sole resident, consider making an inquiry with the current owner, who purchased the town for $900,000 in 2012. Related: 9 Towns That'll Pay You to Move There Photo: flickr.com via Jimmy Emerson, DVM Swett, South Dakota 11/11 Swett, South Dakota The only home standing on this six-acre town on the southern border of South Dakota is said to be haunted. But if you find ghost tales thrilling, you can pick up the title to the land for a mere $250,000. =================================================================================================================

Everything You Need to Know about Buying a Town BY DAN NOSOWITZ MAY 14, 2015 Everything You Need to Know about Buying a Town Johnsonville, CT: not exactly what it seemed. Johnsonville, CT: not exactly what it seemed. G. MORTY ORTEGA/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE, A close look at real estate listings turns up something odd: not merely a house, not merely land, but an entire town, sometimes a long-abandoned ghost village. The listings arouse primal desires reminiscent of childhood Monopoly games. You can own the houses, the streets, the banks, the taverns, the land, everything you can see. Perhaps it can become a commune, a tourist destination, or just a bizarre vacation home. But money alone might not guarantee the purchase of your dream town. “It’s romantic, but it’s difficult,” says John Lovelace, a realtor specializing in some of British Columbia’s most unusual properties. “People have this idea that they can get away from it all, go paint up there, fix it up and you’re set for life. The reality is that it’s very very difficult.” Whole towns for sale occupy lots of different legal positions, based on their history and what exactly is for sale. Each town has its own story, a totally unique path that brought it to the point of sale. Garryowen, MT, is for sale. Garryowen, MT, is for sale. ANDREW FILER/FLICKR Often, when we talk about a “town for sale,” the phrase is more figurative than literal. Johnsonville, a town in Connecticut, recently attracted attention when it went up for auction, and later for a normal sale. A group of people on Twitter, loosely led by a Chicago-based writer and programmer named Dan Sinker, began trying to pool their money via Google spreadsheet and purchase the town back in April. Johnsonville is perhaps the least remote ghost town currently on the market, only about 30 miles from Hartford. It is beautiful, with airy but derelict colonial homes, including 19th-century barns, churches, and houses. It seems impossibly idyllic, a town that exists in our imagination as a perfect New England hamlet rather than a place you can buy. VIDEO FROM ATLAS OBSCURA 00:09 / 04:06 The Little Meteorite That Could There’s a reason for that. Meagan Williams of RM Bradley, the real estate company that worked on Johnsonville the last time it was listed, in 2013, explained via email that nothing about Johnsonville is as it seems. The town of Johnsonville never really looked like this; it was an old mill town, but the way it looks now has no relation to any part of its history. “It is just a parcel of land within Moodus, Connecticut that is made up of buildings that look like an old town,” she writes. “The current owner collected old taverns, post offices, general stores and had them moved to his property. None of the buildings are currently in use. Johnsonville was originally one of the twine-producing capitals of the world, back in the mid-19th century when an American town could produce something like twine in bulk. Like most of the other manufacturing centers in New England—New Bedford, the former whaling capital of the world, comes to mind—production eventually declined and much of the town, including a general store, was abandoned. In 1960, Raymond Schmitt, the CEO of AGC Corporation, an aerospace firm, purchased the “town,” really just a plot of land surrounding the old twine mill. But Schmitt wanted Johnsonville to look even more like a Victorian center of commerce, so he imported buildings, sometimes across state lines, to the town. That gorgeous Victorian stable? Yeah, that’s not a Johnsonville original. It was trucked over a few decades ago from Massachusetts. Johnsonville isn’t a ghost town. It’s an abandoned theme park. Its current listing price is $2.4 million. Garnet, MT is looking for residents. Garnet, MT is looking for residents. MONTANA LANDSCAPE ART/GETTY IMAGES For true ghost towns, you have to look westward. Swett, South Dakota is an unincorporated town about two hours by car from Rapid City. Swett’s current population is two, but it was never bustling; At its peak, in the 1940s, it had a population of 40. Currently the town consists of little more than a bar, a workshop, a few trailers, and a single house, all on 6.16 acres of prairie near the Nebraska border. “As the only watering hole in a 2-mile radius, the Swett Tavern is still the de facto gathering place for a small army of local cowboys and wheat-growers,” writes Daniel Simmons-Ritchie of the Rapid City Journal. Swett is a classic western ghost town: the Swett Tavern, to most of the country, looks more like a movie set than a bar. But venturing further west, and north, leads to the most interesting ghost town of all. Northern Canada’s vast expanses of land are essentially empty of sizable towns, but they aren’t empty of natural resources. John Lovelace has worked in several places across British Columbia and neighboring provinces that he classifies as “single economic-use towns.” These were essentially company towns. “Until about 1980, in resource extraction in this country, what they used to do was they’d create these towns and put in an infrastructure. They would have schools, and shopping centers, and bars, and everything else,” says Lovelace. The conglomerate finds some natural resource—for a long time it was gold, then uranium to sell to bomb-hungry Americans–and builds the mine or other extraction center. Then they’d construct some houses, some roads, and start moving people out to work in the mines. The province would then step in and introduce the utilities and institutions, like electric, gas, septic systems, hospitals, and schools. The miners typically, though not always, rented their homes from the company, which meant that many of these towns really were single-owner towns. View of a mine at Uranium City. View of a mine at Uranium City. PAOLO KOCH/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES They were built quickly, but weren’t meant to be temporary. Nobody knew if the natural resources would run out, or when, and some towns grew to over 5,000 people. And then, inevitably, the resource would peter out, and the miners would move onto the next project. The mining companies would try to unload the towns to anyone who’d buy them, but without a population or any particular reason to be there, the towns quickly died. Uranium City, a spectacularly-named town in northern Saskatchewan, was one of the biggest. “There’s uranium all over the world but the Americans needed stable supplies, so they ended up going to the Canadians and saying ‘we’ll give you a premium for this for 20 or 30 years, so we can build up our nuclear stockpiles,’” says Lovelace. With that kind of contract, Uranium City thrived until 1982, boasting an airport and even a local newspaper, The Uranium Times. But when the mines shut down in 1982, the city was abandoned as quickly as any other and sold off in pieces. Today it has about 201 residents. “The bears are roaming the streets now,” says Lovelace. Lovelace recently completed the sale of a smaller town: Bradian, British Columbia. Bradian was originally a gold mining town with 22 homes, power and phone lines, and, says Lovelace, “really mild winters and beautiful summers, a coastal climate.” It’s about an hour drive from Whistler, one of the best ski resorts in the world—at least in the summertime, when crossing the treacherous Hurley Pass is easiest. (In the winter, it’s more like six and a half hours.) It reached its peak in the 1930s, but panic struck in 1971, when President Richard Nixon cancelled the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold. Suddenly no longer pegged to the dollar, gold prices plummeted, and the town collapsed. Thousands of residents left. Bradian, in Canada. Bradian, in Canada. SHAUNDD/CC BY-SA 3.0 A few attempts were made to convert Bradian into a retirement community. Canadians, lacking hot-weather retirement spots like Florida and Arizona, often retire to the province with the mildest weather, British Columbia. The mining company, which owned the entire town, immediately sold Bradian to a developer. But Bradian proved too expensive and just a touch too isolated to make into the next Vancouver Island, and so was sold after the 1981 economic crash to a family who used it as a vacation spot. That family decided to unload it last year. When trying to sell Bradian, Lovelace fielded dozens of serious inquiries from buyers; its proximity to both Whistler and Vancouver (the latter only four hours away), its many still-standing houses, and that it’s already on the electrical and phone grid makes it one of the most desirable ghost towns in all of Canada. But Lovelace was blunt about the condition of the town, which needs far more than a fresh coat of paint. “There’s a reason why we live in cities!” he says. “There’s a romance about [Bradian], but I tell people the same thing: know what you’re getting involved with.” The town is not an easy fixer-upper, but earlier this year, Bradian was sold to a group of Chinese developers for around a million dollars.