BUFORD, Wyo. — A remote, unincorporated area along busy Interstate 80 that advertised itself as the smallest town in the United States, Buford was sold at auction for $900,000 on Thursday to an unidentified man from Vietnam.
Its owner and sole resident for the past 20 years, Don Sammons, served with the U.S. Army as a radio operator in 1968-69. After meeting the buyer, an emotional Sammons said it was hard for him to grasp the irony of the situation. “I think it’s funny how things come full circle,” he said.
The buyer attended the auction in person but declined to meet with the media or to be identified. Sammons and others involved in the auction would not discuss the buyer’s plans for Buford.
It will take about 30 days for all the paperwork to be completed before ownership of the place almost equidistant between Cheyenne and Laramie in southeastern Wyoming changes hands, Sammons said.
The new owner will get a gas station and convenience store, a schoolhouse from 1905, a cabin, a garage, 10 acres and a three-bedroom home at 8,000 feet altitude — overlooking the trucks and cars on the nearby interstate on one side and the distant snowcapped mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado on the other.
