Boundary Surveys and Roads

Often a comment similar to the following is made by a client, "I have roads on two sides of my property so it should be simple for you."  I wish that were so, and in some areas it might be.  But in rural Maine and New Hampshire, defining the right of way line of a road is not always simple.  You can see the pavement, but was it built where it was supposed to be built?  How wide is the right of way?  2 rods?  3 rods?  50 feet?

Roads laid out in newer subdivisions  typically are monumented and have accurate descriptions, so the right of way can be reproduced on the ground.  Older roads may no have well defined descriptions.  I have seen old road layouts that read similar to the following:

"Beginning at an anvil buried in the front of Jane's Blacksmith shop, then southerly 600 feet to an apple tree blazed in the northeast corner of Smith's orchards..."

As the description could be from 1863 or 1710, I don't expect to find any of the monuments called for in the description.  What I hope to find are monuments along the right of way line which will provide evidence of what was intended. 

Many older roads were not formally described.  In these cases, the surveyor    must rely on the monumentation found on the ground and the physical location of the road pavement. 

Another interesting situation is when a road is moved.  The 1840 deed was written to the road as it existed then.  In 1902, the road was straightened and the new road bed is 100 feet east of the old road bed.  What happens to the land in between?  Is your lot now 100 feet longer?  The answers to these questions lie in how the town/county/state acquired the land to straighten the road.  The records of the land taking need to be researched to answer that question. 

There can also be the situation where a road is laid out and then built in the wrong place.  I discovered an example of this in a coastal Maine town.  The back lot I was surveying was about 50 feet further from the road than it should have been.  In other words, the lots  in front were 250 feet deep rather than 200 feet.  Had the front lots used 50 feet of my clients land?  After researching the county road layout and locating some of the original monuments, we found that the curve in the road had been shifted to the east.  The actual pavement in front of our lot was outside of the right of way.  The front lots were laid out correctly based on the county layout and they were all enjoying an extra-large front yard. 

And so, where roads are concerned, things may not be as obvious as they appear.

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