Click Here to Buy Your Own Fiefdom

Loved our story Monday about the Laguna Hills guy who owns a town in Northern California and now hopes to sell it on EBay. I loved it because I didn’t know people owned towns or that you could buy and sell them online. I thought EBay was where people got rid of old Jefferson Airplane albums.

But there it is: Bridgeville is for sale.

Who among us hasn’t said from time to time, “Hey, what would it be like to own a town in the middle of nowhere?�

The prospect is even more tantalizing to someone like me. I don’t even own a house.

The town sounds like something you’d win in a poker game in the 1870s, but that isn’t how the story goes. Financial broker Bruce Krall bought Bridgeville in 2004 and told the Times he’d hoped to turn it into a retreat, but family matters forced him to change his plans.

He bought it for $700,000 and, he says, put several hundred thousand dollars into it. He’s set starting bids at $1.75 million for the auction, which will open April 4.

That price pretty much is a deal-breaker for me, because after I contacted some pals to see if they wanted to own a town, they came up with $27.

The sale price includes seven houses currently used as rentals (population: about 20) and a vacant machine shop, a vacant cafe and a post office,

What to do with a town? The EBay site says the opportunities are “endless� and tosses out ideas like using it as a corporate retreat, riverfront resort, college campus or private ranch.

Those all sound like an awful lot of work. You’d have to hire builders and landscapers and property managers and, if you were opening a campus, some students. That could get pretty expensive. My hopes and dreams are much simpler: I just want to be The Man.

Or Mr. Mayor. Or Your Lordship. Or whatever else I dictate that my subjects call me.

I would be a benevolent lord, but why buy a town if you couldn’t run the place like you owned it? Instead of walking around like most of us do in our daily lives, with our tails between our legs, imagine the kick of walking around a town of 20 people and having everyone of them saying, “Mornin’, Mr. Mayor. Good to see you, sir!�

They’d have to say that because you could run them out of town if they didn’t.

Bruce Krall doesn’t see it that way. He says he never thought of renaming the place “Bruceville� and that his plan was to use the bucolic setting for his long-standing dream of building an Esalen-like arts and learning center for self-improvement.

I guess they’re just not making feudal landlords like they used to.

Krall, 46, says he cares about Bridgeville and appreciates its century-old history as a meeting place for area people. He hopes any new owner would respect all of that but realizes he has only so much control over what a new owner might do.

Amazingly, the website announcing the auction got 70,000 hits on Monday, Krall says. “It just seems to be an appealing story,� he says, both because of its history of being the first town sold online and the various possibilities for it.

In all likelihood, the town will be bought by a developer or a businessman. Maybe it’ll just be a landlord who will be content to draw rent money and leave things alone.

Krall’s vision sounds much purer, and the area probably will lose something if he sells. He insists he doesn’t have to, but it sounds like a done deal.

What price immortality? That’s the question Carrie Williams, who works with the agency handling the auction, asks.

Indeed.

To truly be the lord of the realm. To rule all that you can see, for as far as you can see. To be a giant among men.

Krall is soon to relinquish that powerful opportunity. He’s free to do so, but it’s not too late for him to leave something behind:

He can still rename the town Bruceville.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

[email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.