Up for Auction: America's Smallest Town

Got $100,000 lying around? You could buy a very small house in a decent suburb, or you could place the opening bid in the upcoming auction for Buford, Wyoming. The 10-acre town currently contains a post office, gas station, trading post, and exactly one resident. Tomorrow, that resident, Don Sammons, 61, will sell the town at auction, USA Today reports. He says he's hoping the buyer's "dream continues to keep Buford moving in the 21st century."

The auction advertises Buford as a "unique opportunity" to "own your own income-producing town," but that's not entirely true. Sales of small towns are becoming, if not exactly a trend, more common. Pray, Montana, pop. 8, is for sale as well, with a list price of $1.4 million, and last fall the mostly abandoned town of Scenic, South Dakota, was sold for $700,000. Many of these towns were originally built by speculators hoping a railroad would pass through them, a historian explains; now, they're just interesting real estate. (More small towns stories.)