Articles Posted in Something completely different

I ran across a blog post by Andy Nold, a surveyor, about his research into a large subdivision of land in Reeves County. It provides great incite into the challenges faced by surveyors in West Texas. Here is his post, with permission:

Today’s surveying challenge is the garden spot of northern Reeves County, Texas. Mont Clair is a dusty little burg miles from civilization and services that makes Orla look like a major metropolitan destination. Mont Clair was platted in 1911 over several sections of Blocks 57 and 58 of Township 1 of the T&P Railway Company Survey, bisected by the Pecos River Railroad (later the Panhandle and Santa Fe). Speculation on a great land rush brought by the development of canals and cheap farmland, Mont Clair joined many other now defunct towns along the railroad like Arno, Angeles, Dixieland, Riverton, and Patrole. Unfortunately, the sales of Pecos River water rights far exceeded the actual quantity of water that the river could provide especially with the development of dams and lakes in New Mexico that reduced the flow.

The subdivision plat was signed by J.L. Walker, president of the Pecos Valley Interstate Livestock Company whose principle place of business was Groesbeck, Limestone County, Texas. The partnership included L.B. Cobb, Jr., W.W. Brown, R.L. Reese, R.M. Cralle, L.L. Brown and F.F. Brown. The plat purports to be based on a survey made by L.B. Cobb. It is a very large map and has no recording information. The plat is kept in a big folder at the courthouse and all the deeds referencing it just cite “Lot #, Block # in the Town of Mont Clair, Reeves County, Texas as shown by the map or plat of said town of record in the Deed Records of Reeves County, Texas.”

The town is aligned to the railroad, occupying most of Section 18 and portions of Sections 13 and 19. The north town limits are annotated N 70°20’ E. The east line of Section 18, Block 57, Twp. 1 is annotated NS and the Pecos River Railroad slices through the east third of town on a 50-foot right-of-way. There is no call for any monumentation and no ties to the section corners. The blocks are 250’x250’ with 20-foot alleys and 60-foot street rights-of-way.

Several other sections adjoining the town lots and in the vicinity are also platted into farm lots, 80 equal sized lots on the typical section ringed with an apparent right-of-way of unknown dimension. It is my belief that the sections were presumed to be 640 acres oriented to the cardinal directions.

A Reeves County history says that a Post Office was organized for Mont Clair in 1911. I do not know if any buildings or residences were constructed at all. I have found nothing indicating a railroad depot was ever here, although several of the other ghost towns listed did have a depot at one point. Lot and farm sales must have been good because in 1952, G. E. Ramsey and G. E. Ramsey, Jr., sued over 1,000 property owners and won a judgment in a Trespass to Try Title suit.

http://law.justia.com/cases/texas/supreme-court/1961/a-7892-0.html

While the Ramseys did gain title to close to 6000 acres of land, some landowners successfully defended their title. Other landowners successfully sued for the return of their property a few years later. My company has been hired to locate 2 of the town lots and 2 of the farm tracts. You may wonder why anyone would be concerned about a few acres of scrub desert land that can barely support cattle or farming in the middle of nowhere. You might be surprised to learn that the commuter adjusted daytime population of the ghost town of Mont Clair is much greater than zero as various people pursue their daily occupations. The town sits atop the Delaware Basin oil shale formation which has some of the most active oilfields in Texas. I’m sure the landowners who sued to reclaim their property were more concerned about maintaining their mineral interests than the surface use.

In talking to one of the Reeves County officials, the plat has never been vacated. No field work has been scheduled yet but I am not optimistic about finding any evidence. We have previously tied the railroad right-of-way through this section and there are several different opinions about where the section corners are supposed to be as evidenced by multiple monuments at each corner. Continue reading →

Sent to me by a friend:

Edgar Freeman Smith was the youngest child of a circuit preacher. By age eleven he had to work in a coal mine to support his widowed mother. When he was eighteen they lost their home to foreclosure. People told him to learn a trade if he wanted to get by. Edgar’s ears were plugged to that. All he ever wanted to be was a lawyer.

He sweated all day and studied into the night. This was back when you could read for the law. After six years of reading, Edgar took the bar exam. He passed. Edgar Freeman Smith was a lawyer.

On this day in 1787 Alexander Hamilton, under the pen name “Publius,” published the first of the 85 letters to newspapers later named the Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, to argue for adoption of the U.S. Constitution. We’ve been arguing about it ever since.

Hamilton wrote, in part:

I propose, in a series of papers, to discuss the following interesting particulars:

This was written by the late Joe Edwards, a Jazz pianist from Missouri:

World War II Love Story

It was a time of Harry James and Betty Grable; a time of seams in the ladies stockings, of Rosie the Riveter, ration stamps for gasoline, shoes, fuel oil, sugar and tires.

Friday was the anniversary of Black Sunday, in 1935, the worst dust storm in the Dust Bowl days of the Texas Panhandle. The photo below is of Pampa, Texas on that day.

My parents were married in 1929, after their high school graduation. They farmed outside Friona, Texas, in the western Panhandle, and lived through the Dust Bowl. Friona is in Parmer County, all of which was originally part of the XIT Ranch, sold by the State of Texas to a British syndicate to finance the construction of the state capitol. By the 1930’s the Capitol Land Syndicate had sold off much of the ranch to farmers, with financing. The Syndicate built a hotel in Friona where prospective buyers would stay after arriving on the train. Parmer County did not suffer the out-migration of farmers experienced by much of Oklahoma and North Texas because the Syndicate agreed not to foreclose on farm mortgages if farmers would stay on the land. Other photos of the Dust Bowl can be seen here.

I recently read a biography of R.B. Masterson, famous cattleman, written by his son-in-law Z.T. Scott in 1930. Scott listed as Masterson’s first outstanding quality his honesty. “Schooled in the days when a man’s word was his bond and elaborate contracts with legal perplexities were unthought of, his sense of honor and justice made valid every promise; and no man may point to an agreement broken or a pledge unkept.” The cowboy way.

Our firm represented a cowboy, a rodeo team roper named Clint Sanders, in a dispute with another roper,  Eric Randle, over “mount money.” The Waco Court of Appeals recently affirmed a judgment for Sanders, for $39,501. In affirming the judgment, the Court of Appeals quoted fictional cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy, who suggested that agreements made the “cowboy way” are held to a higher standard. “The highest badge of honor a person can wear is honesty. Be truthful at all times”; “If you want to be respected, you must respect others. Show good manners in every way”; and “Only through hard work and study can you succeed. Don’t be lazy.”

Mount money is known in the rodeo business as the share of winnings a roper pays to the owner of the horse he rides when he borrows another cowboy’s horse. Randle’s horse came up lame and he borrowed Sanders’ horse Tex, and won $158,000. But Randle denied he owed Sanders any mount money. The jury found that he did.

Every year, the ABA Journal of the American Bar Association publishes a list of its 100 best blogs related to law topics. One of those on this year’s list is the Texas Agriculture Law Blog, published by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. The author is Tiffany Dowell Lasmet, an Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist in Agricultural Law at A&M. The ABA Journal reports that

Enviromnmental laws, animal safety, real estate and property issues, food safety and fracking are all issues that Texas farmers and ranchers have to contend with, and this blog does a great job of analyzing how recent court decisions or state legislation can affect them. Texas has long been on the cutting edge of energy law, and this blog also offers excellent examinations of how energy companies and agriculturists are dealing with their often-competing interests.

Check it out. Good information about ad valorem tax exemptions, hunting leases, solar leases, hydraulic fracturing, water law and more.

“Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.”

“Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.”

“If you ever injected truth into politics you would have no politics.”