Posted on 05/25/2018 7:44:47 AM PDT by dirtboy
It will probably result in the shortest and easiest access to the public highway.
Determining the bounds of the cemetery is another thing.
Exactly. Lackawanna County is an old, old County. Very historical. Surely an old book of County history would mention the cemetery or ‘burial plot’ as they sometimes referred to it. Maps oft times included. Church records another place to look.
We have a old Revolutionary era family cemetery in NJ that is now surrounded by an oil refinery. Access is granted as long as it is within their operating hours.
Evil woman? For wanting to protect her property? I believe she is absolutely right. The government (local, state, or federal) cannt simply seize control of your property without compensation. It’s the very basis of liberty.
Michah Vail mentioned on pages 637, 638. Interesting.
Not when you have a cemetery on your property.
Easement from where, from when??? If these folks were buried there 100-200 years ago, is that really reasonable.
This is right down the road from where I grew up. I have family in Scott Twp. Sounds to me this woman is eccentric, and if she’d just let some old dude on there to see the grave site, all would have been well. She sounds like an idiot, but it is her land. I own land, and if someone wanted the same from me, I’d let them go to the site(as long as it wasn’t a constant thing, say one/two times a yr). Clean it up within reason, have em sign a waiver against any liability to me, and be done with it.
Related story:
The alleged graves are over 200 years old.
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Which means the only ‘need’ for access is ancestral or historical interest. It’s not like we are talking about the comfort of recently bereaved.
I think the land owner should be given the benefit of options or choices, unless that person purchased the property or came into its ownership with knowledge of the burial site. At the communities expense, the owner should be offered money for the land, or compensated with additional land in another (hopefully adjoining) location, or of they would be willing to be compensated for permitted public access at specified times, to be marked on the property’s access point.
Micah Vaillancourt sounds as though he was a good man. I can see why his family would want to honor him. Pity the family and the private property owner couldn’t have worked out a simple written contract that would allow access while addressing the property owner’s concerns. If I had been the family member, I’d’ve been happy to do that.
Thx for the link, BTW! :-)
Jeepers, Micah Vail. Dang phone’s gone wacko.
In the early 20th Century, their rural property was engulfed by the growing city of Charlotte and a hospital was built on the site of the cemetery. Witnesses to the nefarious deed never talked but when a large expansion of the hospital was begun, an early ditch was uncovered and therein were some, but not all, of the tombstone. As the project continues, the graves came to light and they were excavated by archeologists and historians who were able to connect some names to these remains. The were reinterred to Steele Creek Church Cemetery with appropriate ceremony. This little vignette has been repeated in uncounted cases all over the country. Everyone who has lived on the land for a long period know their local stories. Even Kings are found in Car Parks these days. We are going to keep building car parks and hospitals, but we can deal with this without trampling on property rights.
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/03/05/supreme-court-will-hear-important-proper
Earlier today, the Supreme Court decided to review Knick v. Township of Scott, an important property rights case. The most important issue the Court will consider is whether to overrule Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank, a 1985 decision that makes it very difficult or impossible to bring takings cases in federal court. Under Williamson County, a property owner who contends that the government has taken his property and therefores owes “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment, cannot file a case in federal court until he or she has first gotten a “final decision” from the appropriate state or local regulatory agency and has “exhausted” all possible remedies in state court. Even after all of that, it is often impossible to bring a federal claim, because a variety of procedural barriers preclude federal courts from reviewing state court decisions in cases where the case was initially brought in state court. In some cases, governments defending against takings claims even exercise their right to “remove” the case to federal court, and then manage to get the case dismissed because the property owner did not manage to first “exhaust” state court remedies (a failure caused by the defendants’ own decision to get the case removed).
Williamson County creates an egregious Catch-22 trap for property owners: before they can bring a claim in federal court, they must first go through state courts and administrative agencies. But the very act of going to state court makes it virtually impossible to later appeal the case to a federal court! This is the kind of Kafkaesque idiocy that gives the legal profession a bad name.
In the Midwest, specifically Iowa and Nebraska, if you have a private cemetery on your parcel, you have to allow access within reasonable hours.
A great number of old pioneer cemeteries all over the place.
However, it is almost always called out in the deed.
Show me that exception in the constitution.
Wow, that last paragraph says it all. What a cluster. The reason why SCOTUS took it, I guess?
Why acquiring allodial rightsi, if possible is worth the cost, otherwise the concept of private property doesn’t technically exist.
Yes, all of a sudden this relatively trivial matter takes on very significant importance that could go a long way towards reigning in out of control government takings.
What she should do is dig them up or, at the very least, remove any tombstones that may be around.
For the life of me I don’t understand the purpose of visiting the tombstone of a dead person. They are not there, and if the body’s been there long enough, neither is it.
We like to visit graveyards, but we don’t visit the sites where loved ones are buried. It’s about history and nothing more. And if they are on private property, they are off limits without the land owner’s permission.
Property rights trumps visitation rights. Criminy, they’re dead and have been a LONG time.
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