In 1955, the radio program Sergeant Preston of the Yukon promised that every child who bought a box of Quaker Oats cereal would receive a deed for one square inch of land in the Yukon. The company bought 19 acres on the Yukon River, divided it into square-inch plots, and packed the deeds into boxes of cereal.

In all 21 million plots were distributed this way, and then people, being people, began to explore the possibilities. According to Charles C. Geisler in Property and Values (2000), one deed owner declared independence for his tiny fiefdom; another offered to donate his to create the world’s smallest national park. One boy sent four toothpicks to the title office so they could fence his inch, though the deeds stipulated that each owner must acknowledge the right of every other owner to cross his plot at will. In Canadian Literary Landmarks (1984), John Robert Colombo reports that one wily collector amassed 10,000 deeds and asked to combine them; “his request was denied, as nowhere on the Deed of Land did it state that the square inches were adjacent.”

As it turned out, all this enterprise was moot — Quaker Oats never registered the subdivision or paid taxes on the land, so the whole thing reverted to the Canadian government a few years later.