Bicentennial Opportunities—biggest And Smallest

…Most of us live our threadbare lives in places where nothing much happened,” begins a press release for a Massachusetts organization called Heritage Commons Realty Trust.”… Now along comes Virginia Long Martin with an offer to sell to anyone who has the modest purchase price of $7.76 one square inch of what is about as close to a historic landmark as you can get outside of Independence Hall.”

Ms. Martin is selling a mite of ground in Lexington, hard by the road where the minutemen fired on the British during the eventful afternoon of April 19, 1775.

The purchasers get a gold-sealed, hand-lettered deed conveying beneficial interest to their new land and a parcel number identifying their particular inch. “Beneficial interest” means that the owner is not permitted to build on his plot.

Those who feel that their threadbare lives would not be significantly improved by owning an inch of ground near a country road might consider taking part in a project of immensely larger scope.

An author and patriot named Frederick Goss Carrier, who feels that America has never erected a suitable monument to itself, has formed a nonprofit corporation called Bald Eagle Command. Carrier is proposing a bird sanctuary at least twenty square miles in diameter—the site has yet to be determined—in the middle of which will be a thirty-five-thousand-seat convention center. Atop the center, rising hundreds of feet into the air, will be a monumental statue of a bald eagle with a wingspan of 1,200 feet. (By way of comparison, the world’s tallest statue—a figure called Motherland , on a hill outside of Volgograd in Russia—rises to a mere 270 feet.)

Carrier proposes to do the whole job with volunteer efforts and contributions and hopes to dedicate the monument in 1982, the two hundredth anniversary of Congress’choosing the eagle as our national symbol. So far a New York industrialist has offered Carrier an island in Long Island Sound, but he feels that it is too small for his purposes. His sketch of the proposed convention center appears above.