Pray, Mont.: Buy the Whole Town for $1.4 Million

It's not unheard of for entire towns to hit the real estate market. Take Scenic, S.D., for instance -- which a Filipino church did: They bought the Wild West throwback for $800,000 last fall. And then there was Wauconda, Wash., a four-acre town which sold in 2010 to a Bothell, Wash., couple.

Now another community is available.

Pray, Mont., just listed for $1.4 million, The Daily reports. (Thanks to Curbed.com. for clueing us in.) The village reportedly consists of a small trailer park, a general store (now closed) and a post office. It has an usually large population for a purchasable town: 197 people.

Other towns that have gone on sale typically include a much smaller cast of full-timers. Wauconda has few -- if any -- residents beyond its owners, while another for-sale town, Garryowen, Mont., the site of Gen. George Armstrong Custer's ill-advised attack on Sitting Bull's camp, can also claim just a handful of year-round residents.

So why does Pray's population number nearly 200? As it turns out, a great majority of residents reportedly live outside the town's five-acre area, but the Census Bureau still considers them residents, according to The Daily.

Town owner Barbara Walker told The Daily that she's selling the town because she'd prefer not to continue to manage it alone; her husband died in 2006. Understandable, we'd say, considering the demanding roles she must play aside from being its de facto mayor. "I'm the sheriff and the garbage control and the animal control officer," she told The Daily.

Others who've had to give up the towns they've owned include actress Kim Basinger. The "Batman" star bought the town of Braselton, Ga., for $20 million in 1989 but went bankrupt, dashing her dreams of turning it into a haven for the film community. Ultimately, a land developer picked up the place.

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