'Oatmeal lots' gave officials indigestion

MILFORD -- Boxes of breakfast cereal used to come with small "prizes" inside, worthless trinkets like spy decoder rings, whistles, mini-comic books, rub-on tattoos, collectible cards and plastic trucks.

But beginning in 1902, buyers of Quaker Oatmeal could find a coupon redeemable for an actual deed to a small plot of land in Milford. The tiny parcels were in a subdivision called "Liberty Park" that existed only on paper.

Most of the children from all around the country never bothered to collect their deed, let alone file it on the city land records and pay the miniscule annual taxes on it, officials said last week. But many, particularly from the Bridgeport area, did file the paperwork, or at least their parents did and that created a serious case of heartburn for city officials by 1975.

"I had been tax collector so I knew about these `oatmeal lots' for years," former mayor Joel Baldwin said. "They were still on the books, although they were too small to ever build on and their owners had likely gone on to their great reward. It wasn't the kind of thing you'd leave to heirs in a will -- a couple of square feet in Milford."

In 1975, the area of the oatmeal lots was being sought for industrial development, and the Bic Corp. approached Baldwin's administration about buying the land.

The parcel is now the site of the company's lighter factory, at 565 Bic Drive, and the front portion of the Milford Power Co. plant.

John Dockendorf, who owns a title search company here, worked to track down the owners from the original handwritten deeds, with only a few successes. "The way it worked was that you had to mail in the coupon you found in the box to the New York developer who was working with the company, and he'd forward the deed to the town to be registered.

"I found some (people), but you had tons of individual owners, and most of them had no idea that they owned anything," Dockendorf said.

Baldwin as mayor and his city attorney, Jeff Martalon, sent out tax demand letters to the registered owners, but nearly all of those letters came back as undeliverable. "We were getting almost no tax revenue from these, but we actually did find a few people who wanted to pay up and keep their land," Baldwin said.

"I believe there was a church in Bridgeport who insisted on keeping its oatmeal lot, and I think we ended up condemning it and taking it," the former mayor said.

All of the "lots" were carved out of a 15-acre tract, criss-crossed with street names that only existed in the developer's imagination, including "Campbell Avenue," and Howard, Cleveland and Fisher avenues, Shelland Street (which was finally built in the late 1990s as the access road into the Milford Power Co.) and Caswell Street, which is what Bic Drive was known as at the time.

The subdivision was laid out decades before planning and zoning regulations were introduced here, and some of the "lots" were as small as 10x10, or 100 square feet. "(C.E.) Sheehan, the developer, was hoping to give away the land and to have the owners hire him to build houses for them on it," Dockendorf said. "But you'd have to assemble several (lots) to do that."

James Beard, whose grandfather bought the land behind "Liberty Park" at about the same time, recalled this week that the city had no trouble foreclosing on the oatmeal lots. "I don't think I ever saw anybody come up there to visit "their" land that they got from a cereal box," Beard said.

Baldwin said that he and Martalon quickly determined that foreclosing on hundreds of individual lots would be prohibitively expensive, so they were able to do a general foreclosure, taking care of nearly all of the transactions in one legal filing.

Candace Mueller, a corporate spokeswoman for the Quaker Oats division of Pepsico in Chicago, said that the company had no information on the Milford land giveaway. But she said Quaker Oats had offered another promotion, tied into the "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon" television show in 1955, in which the company put actual deeds to land in the Klondike in its Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice cereal boxes.

The "Klondike Big Inch" promotion, as it was called, was considered the most successful advertising tie-in of the time to the then-new medium of television, according to historian Vincent Summers. The tie-in was probably made because at the time the two Quaker cereals were marketed as being "shot from guns," he said.