In 1902, the Quaker Oats Company launched an odd product promotion that 75 years later caused headaches for officials in Milford, Conn. Boxes of oatmeal contained a coupon that could be redeemed for a legal deed to a plot of land in Milford, a coastal town between New Haven and Bridgeport. People called them “the oatmeal lots.”
C.E. Sheehan, a New York real estate developer, had persuaded Quaker to offer the promotion. He had bought a 15-acre parcel and subdivided it. Some of the tiniest lots measured 10 feet by 10 feet. He named the development-to-be “Liberty Park.”
In 1902, Milford had only about 4,000 people, but a growth spurt soon followed that brought the population to about 50,000 today.
Sheehan hoped people who redeemed the coupons would hire him to build houses in the Liberty Park development. He even dreamed up street names — Howard, Cleveland, Fisher and Campbell avenues, Shelland and Caswell streets.
Laurel Beach, a section of Milford, in 1910
To redeem the coupons, people had to mail them to the developer in New York, and he would forward the deed to the town to be registered.
The Oatmeal Lots of Liberty Park
Most children didn’t bother to collect their deeds. But hundreds, mostly near the Milford area, did. Or perhaps their parents did.
Milford didn’t have zoning laws then, so the registered lots were completely legal. They stayed on the books for years.
Digital StillCamera
Joel Baldwin, as a Milford tax collector, knew all about the oatmeal lots. By 1975, he had been elected mayor of Milford. The Bic Corp. approached him about buying the land for a disposable lighter factory.
Baldwin had the city attorney send out tax demand letters to the registered owners. Nearly all the letters came back as undeliverable. Most of their owners had likely gone on to their great reward, he told the Connecticut Post in 2010. “It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d leave to heirs in a will,” he said.
“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.
Milford Green
John Dockendorf, owner of a Milford title search company, tried to track down the owners from the handwritten deeds. He had little luck. “I found some, but you had tons of individual owners, and most of them had no idea that they owned anything,” Dockendorf told the Post.
Seizing the Oatmeal Lots
Baldwin realized bringing foreclosure proceedings against hundreds of tiny parcels would cost a fortune. He and the city attorney managed to seize the lots by general foreclosure. They encountered one holdout—a church in Bridgeport that wanted to keep its oatmeal lot. The city condemned the property and seized it.
Bic built the factory and changed the name of Caswell Street to Bic Drive. The imaginary Shelland Street became a reality in the late 1990s as the access road into the Milford Power Co.
Quaker Oats Offers More Land
The Quaker Oats Co. had sold oatmeal since 1881. People then considered oats suitable only for horses, and Quaker sought to change that with clever marketing techniques. The company came up with a cylindrical box and an image of a Quaker wearing a characteristic broad-brimmed hat. The Quaker was supposed to represent honesty, integrity, purity and strength. (The Quaker on the box is not William Penn, and within the company he’s called “Larry.”)
Larry
Quaker was the first company to distribute “trial size” samples of its product. Every mailbox in Portland, Ore., received one. It also put a free prize, a small piece of chinaware or silverware, in each box, and printed recipes on the outside of the container.
Quaker also offered the first cereal box premium to buyers. Customers who sent in a dollar and a cutout of the “Quaker Man,” would receive a double boiler for cooking oatmeal. (But it didn’t cost anything to get a parcel of land in Milford, Conn.)
Photo of Richard Simmons as Sergeant Preston and Yukon King from the television series Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
By 1955, Quaker had learned its lesson about land giveaways: don’t do it where anyone might want to build. As a tie-in to the television show “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” it put deeds to land in the Klondike in its Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice cereal boxes. The reasoning? Quaker promoted the cereal as “shot from a gun.”
Images: Aerial view of Milford By makemake – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=949513. Milford City Hall By de:Benutzer:Makemake – eigenes Foto 2005, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32846756. Milford Town Green By Fadein (talk) (Uploads) – Fadein (talk) (Uploads)Transferred from en.wikipedia, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17928940.
