Nguyen’s name was not released last week when he won the auction for Buford — billed as the nation’s smallest town — but he has since drawn attention in Vietnamese media and on social networks.
Nguyen, who bid $900,000 for Buford, runs a trade and distribution company in southern Ho Chi Minh City. He said that although he is not exactly sure what he will do with the town just off Interstate 80, he expects to use it to sell items made in Vietnam.
His purchase impressed many Vietnamese. Businessman Tran Thanh Tung said Friday in Hanoi that he was “surprised, but also proud.”
It’s “something that one could not imagine few years ago,” he said.
Buford consists of a gas station and convenience store, a 1905 schoolhouse, a cabin, a garage and a three-bedroom house on 10 acres between Cheyenne and Laramie.
The town was formed as the Transcontinental Railroad was built in the 1860s. Up to 2,000 people lived there before the railroad was rerouted. Now, it’s more of a stop off the busy interstate for passers-by eager to get a snapshot with the green road sign that reads “Buford, Pop 1.”
The town was sold by Don Sammons, the self-proclaimed “mayor” who owned it for the past two decades and was its sole inhabitant. He now plans to retire and write a book about his life there.
Sammons served a tour in Vietnam from 1968-69 as a U.S. Army radio operator, and said at the time of the sale that his life has come full circle.
Nguyen is from the city formerly known as Saigon, the U.S.-backed capital of South Vietnam that fell to the northern communists in 1975, ending the Vietnam War. Some 58,000 Americans died, along with an estimated 3 million Vietnamese.
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