Cheshire, Ohio, is the first entire town to go up for sale because of an environmental problem, at least as far as the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency can tell.

        A majority of its 219 residents agreed to sell their property to a coal-burning power company that polluted the air with sulfuric acid.

        In return for a promise not to sue American Electric Power, the residents of the Gallia County town will receive $20 million for their homes.

        There was the Love Canal case in New York in 1979, when a chemical company bought from residents private property contaminated by waste. But Carol Hester, a representative of the Ohio EPA in Columbus, said Thursday she knows of no case of an entire town being sold.

        “We have knowledge of some situations where a company has bought out two or three or a handful of properties nearby because of ground-water contamination or something along those lines, but nothing at all of this scale,” Ms. Hester said.

        The closest thing in scale might be the Fernald case, in which landowners near the former uranium processing plant in Crosby Township received damages for their property's loss of value, but kept ownership. In that case, an entire town didn't disappear.

        “It sounds sort of nifty to say they bought a municipality,” said Stan Chesley, a Cincinnati attorney involved in the Fernald settlement, “but in reality, (AEP) just bought all the land.”

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