Burch v. Ingham Lumber Co.

• Decision Date: 23 October 1924
• Docket Number: 2 Div. 841
• Citation: 212 Ala. 204,102 So. 19
• Parties: BURCH v. INGHAM LUMBER CO.
• Court: Alabama Supreme Court

102 So. 19

212 Ala. 204

BURCH v. INGHAM LUMBER CO.

2 Div. 841

Supreme Court of Alabama

October 23, 1924

Rehearing Denied Nov. 27, 1924

Appeal from Circuit Court, Greene County; Fleetwood Rice, Judge.

Action by S.J. Burch against the Ingham Lumber Company. Judgment for defendant, and plaintiff appeals. Affirmed.

Hildreth & Hildreth, of Eutaw, and R.B. Evins, of Birmingham, for appellant.

J.F Aldridge, of Eutaw, for appellee.

SOMERVILLE J.

The chief contentions of appellant, presented as a basis for the impeachment of the judgment below, are (1) that the burden of proving every material allegation of its plea to the jurisdiction rested upon the defendant; (2) that the allegations that it was a foreign corporation, and had its domicile in the state of Missouri, are made material by their incorporation in the plea; and (3) that these allegations were not supported by any evidence before the court.

The first proposition is undoubtedly correct, and the trial court so stated and ruled. At a later stage of the trial, after the reception of testimony tending to show that W.F. Ingham, upon whom the process was served as an officer of the defendant corporation was a resident of Missouri, that the corporation's principal place of business had been in Kansas City, Mo., for 20 years or more, that it had no agent in Greene county, Ala., and was not doing business therein before or at the time of the filing of the suit, or the serving of the summons, and that W.F Ingham was not acting as an agent for the corporation in the transaction of any of its corporate business while he was in Greene county, and when he was there served with process, the presiding judge stated to counsel for plaintiff that the burden was on plaintiff "as to showing the validity of your service, as to the jurisdiction of the court." We do not understand from this that the court intended to place upon plaintiff the burden of disproving defendant's special plea, but only to say that the prima facie effect of the sheriff's return, showing the execution of the process on an officer of the defendant corporation (Acts 1915, p. 607), had been overcome, and that the original burden in that behalf had been revived. See Code 1907,§ 5303; Hoffman v. Ala. Distillery Co., 124 Ala. 542, 27 So. 485. That burden is imposed and exists, irrespective of a special plea to the jurisdiction.

Conceding, without deciding, that defendant was not entitled to judgment on its plea to the jurisdiction, without proof that it was a foreign corporation with a domicile in Missouri, we think that the evidence before the court fairly justified that conclusion as an inference of fact, though there was no direct evidence that the corporation was organized under the laws of Missouri. In a legal sense a corporation can have but one domicile, and that is "the county or district within the state of its creation, where its principal office and place of business is situated." 14a Corp.Jur. 791, §§ 2876, 2877, 2881; Id. 1226, § 3933; Bergner, etc., Co. v. Dreyfus, 172 Mass. 154, 51 N.E. 531, 532, 70 Am.St.Rep. 251, 14 Corp.Jur. 338, § 416.

The evidence shows that defendant's principal place of business has been located in Kansas City, Mo., for 20 years that all of their business, from everywhere, was through that office, that no principal place of business had been maintained at any other place, and that the president and the treasurer of the company resided there. All this is, of course, consistent with the existence of a technical legal domicile elsewhere; but, in view of the character of this corporation and of its business, it may, in the absence of countervailing proof, be fairly presumed to be a Missouri corporation. We think the evidence is conclusive that defendant had...