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A Town Sold on the Web By Jean-Francois Numainville, TheWorldJournal.com 
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PRINT VERSION What do you do when you find yourself with the rights of a town that is long abandoned by its inhabitants? Well, you do what common people do nowadays with the cars, houses, computers, televisions and cell phones they no longer want: You sell them on ebay! After that the seller, who remained anonymous, decided he wouldn't be able to maintain and fix the 130 years old town of Bridgeville, he decided to take the services of Sunset Real Estate, whom decided to put the town on the web for the highest bidder. The minimal skate for the town located in the northern part of the Golden State was set at $775 000, but this included the land on and around the city, all the utilities and houses and "a generous amount of maintenance parts". Although the city of Bridgeville was sold for more than twice the minimal amount, it wasn't until the very last days of the auction that the offered for the small municipality actually climbed over the critical level of $775 000. Yet an intensive day of trading on Christmas day allow the town to switch hands for the appreciable sum of 1 777 877 dollars. The identity of the buyer is unknown, but the people still living in the newly acquired town said it would take just as much money to fix and repair Bridgeville, bearing the full weight of 130 years of existence. But what let Bridgeville to be deserted by its people? Well, we have to go back to the birth of the town in the 1872: The town was created during the gold rush; people were looking around rivers for good places to start gold mining. And so, towns just started pop up really quickly, and Bridgeville was one of them. Yet, the quantity of gold in the rivers and mines of California was largely overrated. There were just a handful of people who actually made money off of that race for finding the precious. And just like most gold miners, the towns create in this period were unfortunate in their faith and most of them were abandoned. Yet some people remained in Bridgeville, and started their own small businesses and decided to raise cattle and established ranches to make a living. The population lived there normally but in the wake of the baby boom of the fifties, the new generation decided to go live in other place, after all the rest of California and the rest of the United-States offered more exiting and promising places to live. And so, Bridgeville is now getting older and older and nobody is there to come and to maintain the town to a normal state. Instead of simply abandoning the town to the hands of time, the remainders of the owners of the city 420 kilometres north of San Francisco decided to try their chances at making a few bucks with the old town and so they came up with the idea of selling Bridgeville to the highest seller. © January 15, 2003 |
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