Editing Milford, Connecticut (section)

===The "oatmeal lots" of Liberty Park===
Starting in 1902, [[Quaker Oats]] oatmeal boxes came with a coupon redeemable for the legal deed to a tiny lot in Milford. The lots, sometimes as small as {{convert|10|ft|0}} by 10 feet, were carved out of a {{convert|15|acre|adj=on}} tract in a never-built subdivision called "Liberty Park". A small number of children (or their parents), often residents living near Milford, collected the deeds and started paying the extremely small property taxes on the "oatmeal lots". The developer of the prospective subdivision hoped the landowners would hire him to build homes on the lots, although several lots would need to be combined before building could start. Since the subdivision into small lots predated Milford's planning and zoning regulations, the deeds were entirely legal, although they created a large amount of paperwork for town tax collectors, who frequently couldn't find the property owners and received almost no tax revenue from the lots.<ref name="fnolg">{{Cite news |last=Juliano |first=Frank |url=http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Oatmeal-lots-gave-officials-indigestion-687006.php |title='Oatmeal lots' gave officials indigestion |pages=A1, A12 |date=October 3, 2010 |access-date=October 23, 2010 |newspaper=[[Connecticut Post]] |archive-date=February 5, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150205005709/http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Oatmeal-lots-gave-officials-indigestion-687006.php |url-status=dead }}</ref>[[Image:BarberJohnWarnerOysterHutsMilfordPoint.jpg|thumb|right|''Oyster Huts on Milford Point'', a sketch by [[John Warner Barber]] for his ''Historical Collections of Connecticut'' (1836). Barber wrote that he found 15 or 20 of these seaweed-covered huts along the shore when he visited the town in 1836.]]

In the mid-1970s, when the town wanted to develop the area, town officials put an end to the oatmeal lots in a "general foreclosure" that avoided the enormous expense of individual foreclosures by condemning nearly all of the property in one legal filing. One of the streets in the Liberty Park subdivision plans, Shelland Street, was later built in the late 1990s as an access road to the Milford Power Company. The site is currently home to the [[Société Bic|Bic Corporation]]'s [[lighter]] factory at 565 Bic Drive.

In a separate land giveaway in 1955 tied to the ''[[Sergeant Preston of the Yukon]]'' television show, Quaker Oats offered in its [[Puffed Wheat]] and [[Puffed Rice]] cereal boxes genuine deeds to land in the [[Klondike, Yukon|Klondike]].<ref name="fnolg" />