ACQUIESCENCE
One big happy family … until part of the homestead gets sold.
Lawyers and surveyors are the first to tell you that you should always carefully survey and protect the boundaries of your property. Daily. It’s as important as flossing. And the advice is ignored just as often.
This is especially so when the adjoining property owners are family. If you can’t get along with your kin …
In today’s case, a family farm — handed down from father to son to son — had adjacent farmland parcels. The brothers owning them agreed that a barbed-wire fence they laid — measured off the centerline of a county road — was the boundary between their lands. They measured carefully and marked the fence with fed flags and pennies crimped around the barbed wire, but they didn’t use a surveyor. After all, we’re all family, so who needs to waste money on a third-party?
The problem was that the county road centerline wasn’t accurate. As a result the 60-acre parcel and the 18-acre parcel were off by about a quarter-acre in favor of the bigger piece of land. But no one knew it, and the agreed-upon boundary survived the decay of the fence, the installation of a mobile home and the digging of a well to replace one end of the fence.
It wasn’t until the 18-acre parcel passed out of the family that the buyer discovered — four years after he took possession — that the presumed boundary was off a bit. What’s a quarter acre out in Nebraska farm country? For the buyer, Aaron Sila, it was a lawsuit.
A long-standing rule provides that mutual acquiescence between owners can establish a boundary line where the actual location of the line is unknown. The Nebraska trial court held, however, that the doctrine wouldn’t work in this case, because the line could easily have been calculated by a surveyor using the legal descriptions in the deed. The ruling, of course, begged the question: when exactly would a boundary be unknown if the owners hired a surveyor? Shades of Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns,” back in the golden days of the Iraq invasion!
The Nebraska Supreme Court recognized that the trial court’s impossible standard effectively gutted the mutual acquiescence doctrine, and it reversed the decision. It didn’t matter, the Court said, that owners might be able to fix the actual boundary by hiring lawyers and surveyors. They in fact didn’t know where the line was for sure, and they agreed to what each knew was an approximation. It worked for longer than the 10-year statutory period, the Court found, and that was good enough to establish a new boundary by acquiescence.’
Sila v. Saunders, 743 N.W.2d 641, 274 Neb. 809 (2008). This case arose as a boundary dispute between two adjoining farm property owners, Kirk and Aaron. The properties were once part of a single farm owned by Kirk’s grandfather, but the land was divided into three parcels and given to his three sons: Vern, George, and Kirk’s father, Eugene. George got an 18 acre parcel east of a county road. Vern and Eugene were each given adjacent 30-acre parcels to the east of George’s 18 acres.
A year later, Vern died, and his 30 acres were acquired by Eugene. Kirk eventually inherited a 20-acre segment of Eugene’s 60 acres. That segment abutted the disputed 18-acre parcel originally given to George. In the early 60s, George and Eugene established the shared boundary of their properties, “[t]o split the farm up to get a boundary line so [George] knew what he owned and what my dad owned,” according to Kirk’s brother, Elloite. George and Eugene decided not to hire a professional surveyor to mark the boundary, and they mistakenly believed that the middle of the county road represented a section line marking the west boundary of George’s 18 acres. George and Eugene took a 100-foot tape measure and some flags and measured 594 feet east from the middle of the county road. They crimped a penny over the barbed wire and tied red flags on the fence at the 594-foot line of both the north and the south ends of the properties. After this, George’s crops were farmed on the west side of the boundary, and Eugene planted his crops on the east side of the boundary. An aerial photograph from the time showed a clear demarcation between the two parcels that appeared to be parallel to the county road from which the boundary had been measured.
In 1965, Kirk removed the barbed wire fence on the south end of the property, but placed a water well next to the property line designated by the crimped penny. After the removal of the fence in 1965, the well was understood by George and Eugene to be the south visual marker for the boundary between their properties. George and Eugene farmed their respective lands with the well on the south end and the crimped penny on the north end of the boundary for 21 years. When George died in 1986, Eugene and Elliotte continued to farm Eugene’s 60-acre parcel, and they also farmed George’s land for his widow, but they maintained the crop boundary line according to the well/stump boundary. When Eugene died three years later, Elliotte continued to farm George’s land and the 20 abutting acres inherited by Kirk, and he still considered the well and the tree stump as boundary markers.
Aaron Sila bought the 18 acres from George’s widow in 2001. Four years later, he hired a surveyor, who found that the centerline of the county road along the west side of Aaron’s property did not — as George and Eugene had believed — correspond to the section line. Aaron’s surveyor didn’t notice either a stump or a well as visual markers of a boundary line.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns?” The Court said that doctrine didn’t limit mutual acquiescence.
Elliotte hired a surveyor, whose survey showed the disputed area as a trapezoid of about .264 of an acre in issue. The trial court found that Aaron owned the disputed parcel, because mutual acquiescence can only fix a boundary that is otherwise unknown. Since the true location of the boundary was set forth in the legal description and was readily ascertainable through conventional surveying techniques, the court concluded it was “known.” The court also rejected Kirk’s adverse possession claim. Kirk appealed.
Held: The trial court’s decision was reversed. The Nebraska Supreme Court held that under the doctrine of mutual recognition and acquiescence, while a boundary may be fixed in accordance with a survey, when a different boundary is shown to have existed between the parties for the 10-year statutory period, it is that boundary line which is determinative and not that of the original survey. The fact that the true boundary might be “knowable” because the deed contains a metes and bounds description that a registered surveyor could have properly marked on the land — but did not — does not preclude the property owners from acquiescing in a boundary that they believe corresponds with the deed’s description.
Here, the two owners knew that the boundary line was merely an approximation of the real boundary. Nevertheless, that fact did not preclude a finding of mutual recognition and acquiescence, so long as the acquiescing parties recognized this approximation as their actual boundary. In order for mutual recognition and acquiescence to operate, there had to be an assent, by words, conduct, or silence, in a line as the boundary.
– Tom Root
Tree and Neighbor Law For Homeowners and Professionals 