For sale: one Montana town.
The owner of Pray hopes to find a buyer who can breathe life into a small collection of buildings in five acres of the Paradise Valley. She’s willing to part with the place for $1.4 million.
“It’s a town,” said the owner, Barbara Walker. “There’s status in being able to own a town.”
The community includes a four-unit trailer park, a shuttered general store and a post office serving ZIP code 59065. Although census figures put Pray’s population at 197, all but a handful of them live in the wide-open countryside outside the town, which sits beside a scenic stretch of state highway about 30 miles north of Yellowstone National Park.
Pray is surrounded by verdant meadow between two ranges of rugged peaks. The vistas have attracted plenty of well-heeled buyers before — the actors Jeff Bridges, Dennis Quaid and Peter Fonda all have homes in the area.
Walker said she’s only selling because, after losing her husband to cancer in 2006, she’d rather not run the place alone. Since her husband’s death, Walker has been the unofficial mayor of Pray.
She collects $200 in monthly rent from each of the trailers, a bit more from the post office, and doesn’t stand on ceremony when it comes to titles. In addition to mayor, “I’m the sheriff and the garbage control and the animal control officer,” Walker said, laughing.
Since its founding in 1907, the town has gone through several different owners and one change of location, said Paul Shae, director of the Yellowstone Gateway Museum in nearby Livingston. Named after an early 20th century Republican congressman named Charles N. Pray, the town originally sat beside a railway on the opposite bank of the Yellowstone River. In 1936, Pray moved to its current spot beside Highway 540, which was once a main route for tourists headed to the national park.
When the Walkers bought the place in 1953, the town boasted a general store and bar with a petting zoo out back. Still, calling the place a town today might be a stretch.
“You can blink and miss it real easy,” Shae said.
But Walker hopes a new buyer may change that. She suggested the new owner could restore Pray’s status as a gathering spot for a community that’s spread thinly beneath the valley’s big sky. Back when Walker’s mother-in-law helped run the place, “you went to the store to find out who was getting married and who was having a baby,” she said. “If UPS couldn’t find somebody, she’d just have them leave the package at the store because eventually everyone would come by.”
As to flexibility on the price, Walker’s playing her cards close to the vest. “You gotta play like you’re playing poker,” she said. “It’s easier to go down than to go up.”
No comments:
Post a Comment