Hayden v. Skillings

• Decision Date: 09 November 1886
• Parties: HAYDEN v. SKILLINGS.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

6 A. 830

78 Me. 413

HAYDEN

v. SKILLINGS.¹

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

November 9, 1886.

On report from supreme judicial court, Somerset county.

Trespass quare clausum fregit. The opinion states the facts.

E. W. & F. E. McFadden, for plaintiff.

Webb & Webb, for defendant.

VIRGIN, J. Trespass quare clausum fregit, by the owner of the fee, for cutting and carrying away grass growing within the located limits of the land duly taken by right of eminent domain, and occupied by the Maine Central Railroad. The defendant justifies as section foreman of the railroad company in executing the instructions of its general manager and road-master to cut and burn the brushes, grass, and rubbish within his section, along the side of its track, to prevent fire from its locomotive spreading upon land of adjoining and adjacent owners.

It is common learning that railroads are of public convenience and necessity; and that, when the corporations cannot purchase the land for their location and use, they may take it, by right of eminent domain, on payment of the damages legally assessed therefor, which, considering the elements which enter into their estimation, is practically quite equal to the full value of the land. Hence, although such corporations are owned by private individuals, still they are denominated quasi public corporations; and in the land so taken they acquire an easement,—an incorporeal right only,—the fee still remaining in the owner of the land. But easements are as various as the purposes to which land and buildings may be applied. They vary, as to the mode and extent of occupation, according to the particular use to be made of them under the authority by which they are acquired. The character and extent of easements acquired by pew-owners in meeting-houses, in land flowed by mill-dams, in land taken for canals, town ways, and highways, are well defined; and the respective rights of the land-owners, and of those having the easements, have long been settled by numerous decisions of this court which it is needless to cite here. The mode and extent of the use necessarily "varies, not only according to the exigencies of each particular kind, but to the varying circumstances of each species of public work." Brainard v. Clapp, 10 Cush. 10. The rights, under public easements, are commensurate with and include such use and occupation as are directly or indirectly conducive to the free exercise and "full enjoyment of the franchise, and the advancement of the public benefit contemplated by the public work."

It follows that the easement in lands taken for the purpose of a railroad is obviously vastly different from that in lands appropriated to the various kinds of other public ways. Its propelling power; its numerous freight and passenger trains, driven at the high rate of speed demanded by the public; its absolute responsibility for damage to insurable property, real and personal, contiguous to its lines, caused by fire communicated, regardless of all possible care on its part, by its locomotives, (Rev. St. c. 51, § 64,) or so communicated to materials growing and naturally between its road and property not contiguous and extending thereto, (Pratt v. Atlantic & St. L. R. Co., 42 Me. 579;) their common-law and numerous statute liabilities,—all require that they shall have, as means to meet these responsibilities, the fullest opportunity which the freest use, occupation, and control of the land within its lines can afford, without the intervention of any acts on the part of the land-owner which may tend to endanger its trains, or otherwise embarrass its use of the easement for the purpose for which...