Attempting to Define Land Boundaries May not Result in Clear Conclusion

E. FAIRFIELD, VT.—Suppose you wanted to know how much land you own here. To get the answer in rural Vermont you go to the town clerk’s office and pull recorded deeds. Some deeds would date to the late nineteenth century. You might learn that what you own is radically different from what you thought you owned. That might bother you if you are from Alaska. If you are a Vermonter, you might not care much.

A deed may tell you that your land begins “at a corner of a beach tree with cedar post stuck near it 44 rods Northwest of whot [the spelling often is questionable, but not the old style script handwriting, which is beautiful compared with 20th century scratching] of whot is called the mineral spring on the Waterville line and about 10 rods Southwest of the pond . . .” Locating the said beach tree, cedar post, pond, and spring may be problematic today. You may also discover that the Waterville line itself is ambiguous.

By the time people moved West they generally stopped measuring land this way. Land in the West is in parcels a mile on a side. Each parcel has 36 sections. It’s obvious from the air. You can even make a reasonable estimate of your ground speed.

If you are going due east, catch the wing’s leading edge as it passes over each road and get the average elapsed time. It will be about six seconds in a large jet. So you are going ten miles a minute, or six hundred miles an hour. If you aren’t going due east or west, or north or south, you have to revert to some trigonometry, but what else do you have to do on a long flight?

So the world of land subdivision is square-cornered where we live. Even on Hillside or in the Mat Valley you may have a long legal description that begins “the east quarter of the west quarter of the northeast half . . . . of Section 36, Range 12 West, Township 2 North, Seward Meridian.” This is just a successive carving down of a mile-square parcel until you reach the square or rectangle that’s yours.

Anchorage subdivisions assume this principle. Lot 25, Block 2 Kempton Park is probably a rectangle within a neighborhood whose definition starts from a corner that’s defined by the Seward Meridian some distance removed.

Wherever the Alaskan parcel, there is probably some staking of it. If one corner is at a section line or a major corner there may be monuments set by the federal government. Developers set rebar and other monuments in neighborhoods. It isn’t likely that all your corners are marked and it will cost more if you want the surveyor to set them. But knowing where your land is and how much of it you own isn’t hard to discover.

Here in rural Vermont it’s different. Old deeds to your property can have interesting conveyances and you wonder what clouds on your title there might be. It was common for all the farm equipment and animals to be deeded with the land. One deed of a former neighbor of my sister Betsy’s sheep ranch gives the ear tag numbers of the cows, and mentions “3 cows with no ear tags.”

In 1965, a predecessor to my sister deeded, along with the land, “two heifers past two years of age that are to freshen soon.” Did they “freshen”? (Whatever unmentionable activity “freshening” is!) If they didn’t “freshen,” will Betsy have a problem selling this property later? What about property disclosure laws? Should she admit prior to a sale that the heifers might not have “freshened?”

Another owner must have gotten in trouble with the town taxing authorities. He deeded the property to the town, which subsequently sold it for $17,000 to somebody else. Of the purchase price, $12,000 was to have been paid as a “stumpage of $15 per thousand feet on all timber now standing or growing” on the property. Did the town get its due? They don’t have the reconveyance documents that we out west are accustomed to.

Defining property by the “metes and bounds,” is the tradition in the east. Whether the old landmarks still exist is often the problem. Betsy’s chain of title includes a deed that begins “at the northwest corner of Lot No. 59 near a large rock then easterly on the north line of said lot 20 chains 70 links to stake & stones . . .” By the time she and the neighbors got done spending thousands of dollars on the land surveyor they had amassed a hundred-page book of old deeds and maps.

In doing so they discovered Betsy’s supposed 108 acres is probably only 75 acres. All the old deeds call it “108 acres, more or less.” But they refer to land bounded by “Neighbor A, Neighbor B,” and so on. Neighbor A’s and Neighbor B’s parcels are equally vague.

Does anybody care? “Well, it does say ‘more or less’ on the deeds,” these farmers say. “A LOT more, or a LOT less?” I ask. “Well, no, but the land is still there,” they answer. “The sheep still graze the same fields. Some of us wonder why we spent all that money on surveying in the first place.”

“What about title insurance?” I ask. Nobody volunteers knowing much about that. There’s no indication a policy exists, although one suspects sellers warrant and insure what they sell somehow.

It all makes me wonder whether litigious Alaskans have it all wrong when we spot an error and march off to court. Maybe like Vermont’s farmers it is sometimes best just to leave things be.