Island Development Co. v. McGeorge

26 F.2d 841, 1928 U.S. App. LEXIS 3786
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Third Circuit
DecidedMarch 23, 1928
DocketNo. 3652
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 26 F.2d 841 (Island Development Co. v. McGeorge) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Island Development Co. v. McGeorge, 26 F.2d 841, 1928 U.S. App. LEXIS 3786 (3d Cir. 1928).

Opinion

WOOLLEY, Circuit Judge.

The plaintiff had judgment and the defendants sued out this writ of error. As the case must be tried again we shall state the issues in detail and discuss all questions raised by the assignments of error.

Percy McGeorge brought this action of ejectment against the Island Development Company and Altantic Brigantine Bridge Company to recover land known as Boot Island, being one of many islands which form the broken shore line of New Jersey. The tract is meadow land, uncultivated and uninhabited, covered in part by every high tide and completely covered by every storm tide. The land acquired importance enough to bring it into litigation when the defendants constructed across it a boulevard which is the only connecting link between Atlantic City and the city of Brigantine.

Following the habit of ejectment cases, perplexing questions of many kinds arose at the trial and now are here for review. Before approaching their consideration we naturally looked at the law of New Jersey applicable in such actions and then carefully studied the pleadings. In doing so we found that evidently the draftsman of the plaintiff’s pleadings had made a like study of the law "before stating his client’s case. That law is briefly stated in Troth v. Smith, 68 N. J. Law, 36, 52 A. 243,- a suit in ejectment on a paper title to land which, as in this case, was wild, unimproved and unoccupied. The court in its opinion first declared familiar law of ejectment, such as, the plaintiff must recover on the strength of his own title, and if the plaintiff fails to establish a good paper title when he relies wholly on such a title, judgment must go against him. The court then said:

“It is equally well settled that the plaintiff must trace his paper title back to some one who is shown to have been in possession of the locus in quo, or falling in that, he must show that his grantor acquired title from the original proprietors.”

Many years back in the chain of a paper title on which the plaintiff in that case relied, the land in dispute was a part of a tract which by a decree of a court of competent jurisdiction had been partitioned and assigned to the heirs of one of the plaintiff’s predecessors in title. The court, speaking of the partition proceedings, said:

“In the execution of their duty the said commissioners necessarily went upon the said lands and assigned the shares of the several heirs. * * * These partition proceedings were such an open, public declaration of the right to possession by the agents or representatives of the heirs of Jeremiah Leeds (the intestate "decedent) as to be tantamount to an occupation by the heirs themselves through whom the plaintiff’s paper title is derived, and in our judgment constitutes, prima facie, a valid paper title.”

With this law before him, the plaintiff in the instant ease filed a narr in ejectment, termed in New Jersey a complaint, and conformably with local practice later filed his “particulars of title” setting forth three claims of title in the nature of as many counts in a narr. As the land of one of his predecessors in title had, as in Troth v. Smith, been partitioned and assigned to his heirs, the plaintiff, following the quoted law that he must trace his paper title back to some one who is shown to have been in possession of the premises in dispute and that such possession may, prima facie, be shown by the possession of the partition commissioners, first drafted a claim of title running back to one William Porch, an intes[843]*843tate decedent, whose property had been partitioned by the Prerogative Court of the state of New Jersey and set off in severalty to one Jacob Porch and thereafter moved from him down to the plaintiff.

Preferring for his own reasons not to rely solely on the paper title thus particularizéd in the first claim, the plaintiff, still with an eye on the law of Troth v. Smith which says that, failing to trace his paper title back to some one who is shown to have been in possession of the locus in quo, “he must show that his grantor acquired title from the original proprietors,” set forth in another claim a paper title originating in a survey by the West Jersey Proprietors to one John Simpson in the year 1741, claiming that the land so surveyed was the island known as Boot Island which includes the land in question. The chain of this paper title purports to run down to the proceedings partitioning the lands of William Porch and through those proceedings to the plaintiff. Thus two paper titles of different lengths were pleaded, the longer embracing the shorter; the shorter possibly being good without the longer, but the longer not being good unless the shorter is good also.

Doubtless for greater assurance, the plaintiff then drew a third claim, not of a paper title but of title by actual, exclusive, continued, uninterrupted, visible, notorious, hostile and adverse possession of the land in question in one John J. Gardner, a predecessor of the plaintiff, for more than twenty years prior to his death in 1921 and like possession in others and finally in himself from that year to the present time.

Thus the plaintiff stated and relied on three distinct titles, that of adverse possession being of course separate from the other two and the other two being separate from each other. For we hold, contrary to the contention of the defendants and in accord with the learned trial court, that it is of no consequence whether the land of William Porch acquired in 1821 and partitioned in 1864 (if it be the land in question) was any part of the original survey to Simpson in 1741 since the act of partition was, as we read Troth v. Smith, an act of possession which (under the first claim) can be treated as a source of title. Having stated three claims of title, the plaintiff might have recovered on any one of them if he had proved the chain of either paper title without a broken link, or failing that, if he had proved possession for a time and of a quality that showed title in him by adverse possession. When the case came to trial the plaintiff, as he now admits in one of his briefs, did not sustain his claim to title by adverse possession through Gardner, for his evidence of possession did not measure up to the requirements of such a title (Foulke v. Bond, 41 N. J. Law, 545), and therefore that claim finally dropped out of the ease, leaving for trial the two paper titles.

The survey to Simpson in 1741 was of an island debatably uncertain as to location, sketchy as to dimensions, yet with its shape shown by an accompanying map. The core of the controversy (tried as a unit when we think it should have been tried by keeping the two paper titles clear and distinct in the minds of the jury) was what lands were covered by the survey of the proprietors and assigned to Simpson, whether an island named Weak Fish Island or Boot Island, the island in question. That was an issue of fact for the jury — an issue of location and identification — with which this court, of course, has nothing to do. We are however concerned with the manner in which the trial court submitted that issue: At the threshold of its charge it tersely stated the issue as follows :

“If it was Weak Fish .Island, the plaintiff is not entitled to a verdict. If it was Boot Island, the plaintiff is entitled to a verdict.”

From this statement of the issues we turn to a discussion of the errors which it is alleged the court committed in the trial, not as specified by the twenty-six assignments of error, some of which overlap, but as stated and numbered in the brief of the plaintiff in error.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
26 F.2d 841, 1928 U.S. App. LEXIS 3786, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/island-development-co-v-mcgeorge-ca3-1928.