Baldwin v. Trimble
| Decision Date | 01 April 1897 |
| Citation | 37 A. 176,85 Md. 396 |
| Parties | BALDWIN v. TRIMBLE. |
| Court | Maryland Court of Appeals |
Appeal from circuit court of Baltimore city.
Suit by William H. Baldwin, Jr., against Frank W. Trimble. Bill dismissed. Complainant appeals. Reversed.
Argued before McSHERRY, C.J., and BRISCOE, BRYAN, PAGE, BOYD, and FOWLER, JJ.
R. W Baldwin, for appellant.
J. J Alexander and Carville D. Benson, for appellee.
The appeal in this case is from a pro forma decree which dismissed a bill of complaint that had been filed to procure a specific performance of a written contract for the sale of land. The defense relied on in the answer is that the appellant's title to a small portion of the property is not merchantable, and three reasons are assigned in support of this position. The property comprises nearly all of one-half of a city block in Baltimore, and fronts 162 feet on Federal street, about 315 feet on Carter alley (including in this distance a road hereafter referred to), 27 feet on Oliver street, and 215 feet on Barclay street, the southwest corner of the parallelogram formed by these three streets and this alley being excluded. The appellant holds title under two deeds,--one assigning the leasehold interest, the other conveying the reversion. In both deeds the entire parcel is conveyed in two lots of unequal size, which are separately described,--the larger one as lying on the north side of Lanvale road, and the smaller one, opposite the southeastern part of the larger, as on the south side of the same road. This Lanvale road ran in a northwesterly direction between the two lots, intersecting Carter alley and Barclay street and diagonally crossing Oliver street; and in the various deeds relating to these two lots that part of the road lying between them is, in terms, conveyed, or attempted to be conveyed, in these words, immediately following the description of the lots themselves, viz.: "Including such parts of said Lanvale road as may lie between said parcels of ground above described, whenever Oliver street aforesaid is opened for travel, and said Lanvale road is closed." Oliver street has long been opened, graded, and paved, and is now a public thoroughfare; and for more than 25 years Lanvale road, though never formally discontinued as a highway by ordinance of the mayor and city council, has in fact been disused and abandoned as a road, and has actually been closed by buildings constructed across it for nearly its entire length; and that portion of it lying between the two lots in question has been obstructed and rendered impassable by the dumping of sand and earth thereon by the appellant since his alleged acquisition of title to it under his deeds. It is now urged that the appellant acquired, under the conveyances alluded to, no title to the small portion of Lanvale road lying between his two lots; and whether this is so depends on the construction that must be given to the deeds. And it is further insisted that the title to the whole road is still in the public, because the road has never been lawfully closed as a highway, and that, not having been so closed, no title by prescription to any part of it can be acquired by an individual. These are two of the reasons or grounds upon which the appellee relies to sustain his position that the title is not merchantable. The remaining objection arises in this way: James Baynes was at one time the owner of the leasehold in this property. In 1861, being indebted to sundry persons, he executed a deed of trust assigning the leasehold interest to Charles E. Wethered, to secure the payment of these debts. The debts were evidenced by promissory notes, all of which matured prior to October 19, 1861. The deed of trust provided for an extension of 18 months, so that all the notes had become due by the latter part of April, 1863. The deed stipulated that the trustee should hold the property as security for the enumerated notes, and, "after the payment of the same, in trust for the said James Baynes"; and it contained a power, given to the trustee, to make sale upon default in the payment of the notes, and upon the request of a majority of the creditors. No sale was ever made by the trustee under this deed, and he is now dead, and it does not appear that any new trustee has ever been appointed. There is no evidence that any of these notes remain unpaid, and about 34 years have now elapsed since the note running the longest, with the 18 months' extension added, matured, and more than 30 years have expired since all the notes were barred by limitations. The trustee did not reconvey the property to Baynes; but Baynes, on January 26, 1870, assigned the same leasehold interest to the National Union Bank of Maryland, by way of mortgage, to secure the payment of borrowed money. The debt to the bank not being paid when due, a decree directing a sale was, under the terms of the mortgage, signed on December 22, 1871; and in January following the leasehold interest was sold under that decree to the appellant, to whom the trustee, William Woodward, executed a deed in January, 1873. This is the deed under which the appellant acquired title to the leasehold interest. Subsequently,--that is to say, on the 3d of October, 1888,--the reversion was sold under a decree in another equity proceeding, and on the 20th of the succeeding month was conveyed to the appellant by Robert C. Thackery, trustee; and this is the deed under which the reversion passed to the appellant. It is, however, now contended that by reason of the outstanding deed of trust to Wethered from Baynes, dated in 1861, no title passed to the bank under the mortgage of 1870, and consequently that nothing was conveyed by the deed executed by Woodward, trustee, under and pursuant to the decree of foreclosure. This is the third objection relied on to show that the appellant's title is defective.
The two objections first stated, being somewhat interwoven, may be considered together. The intention of the parties to an instrument, as gathered from its four corners, and from such foreign circumstances as may, under recognized rules of interpretation, be invoked, must control and define its meaning, unless some fixed, unbending canon of construction or some settled and inflexible rule of property intervenes to frustrate or defeat that intention. This is such an obvious and elementary principle that neither discussion nor adjudged cases need be resorted to for its demonstration. Now, it seems perfectly clear that the grantors in each of the deeds wherein the language heretofore quoted, respecting the consequence of Lanvale road, has been used, did not, by employing that language, attempt the creation of an estate in fee to begin in futuro, as is insisted was the effect of the deed from Thackery, trustee, but, on the contrary, they undertook to transfer and convey all the estate which they possessed in the roadbed subject to the easement in the public so long as the road remained opened. By these conveyances no title was retained in the grantors, but their entire estate vested in the several grantees, the title to the bed of the road being held subordinate to the public easement so long only as that easement should continue. Consequently, upon the cessation of that easement from any cause, the title to the bed of the road became as absolute as though no easement had ever existed. Giving to the language of the various deeds this, its manifest, meaning, it becomes merely a question of fact as to whether Oliver street has been opened for travel, and a question of law as to whether, under the circumstances set forth in the record, Lanvale road has been closed. There is no dispute that Oliver street has been duly opened, graded, and paved (the record is explicit on that subject), and we need not pause to say more on that feature of these objections. That Lanvale road is physically closed, and has been so for 25 years past, is equally free from doubt; but whether this actual obstruction of it, under the circumstances and for the length of time indicated, is a legal closing, binding on the public as an abandonment of the road, is what has been, and still is, denied.
This question is one by no means free from difficulty, or unperplexed by conflicting decisions. There is a line of cases, proceeding upon the maxim, "Nullum tempus occurrit regi," which holds that the rights of the public to a street or thoroughfare cannot be barred by nonuser, and that every act of asserted ownership, such as occupancy, hostile to the public use, is a nuisance, which can never ripen into a private right by mere efflux of time while another series of cases, founded on the assumption that limitations run against the state, or else that the maxim above cited does not apply to...
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