Nelson v. Sandford Mills

• Decision Date: 14 May 1896
• Parties: NELSON v. SANDFORD MILLS.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

36 A. 79

89 Me. 219

NELSON

v. SANDFORD MILLS.

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

May 14, 1896.

(Official.)

Exceptions from supreme judicial court, York county.

Case by William L. Nelson against the Sanford Mills. A nonsuit was ordered, and plaintiff brings exceptions. Overruled.

Edgerly and Mathews, for plaintiff.

Frank Wilson and Frank M. Higgins, for defendants.

PETERS, C. J. This claim surely falls within the class of cases where a plaintiff is debarred from recovering for an injury because he has contributed in causing the injury by his own unjustifiable and foolhardy conduct, although the defendant may also have been guilty in some degree of a prior act of negligence co-operating with his in producing the result; and it is not so clear that defendants were themselves guilty of any negligence which assisted in causing the injury in the present case. The plaintiff's own narrative explains unfavorably to himself the cause of his accident and injury.

He was at work in a manufacturing establishment as an "attic boy," so called, although 30 years old, and a man apparently of a fair Intelligence for one in his situation in life, who had had several years of experience in and about the defendants' mills. He was engaged in the management of a freight elevator, and had been in the same employment for some time before, and had gained a familiarity with the general working and business of the mill. His duties were, with the assistance of an associate employs, to load in the upper stories of the building the products of the mill upon a truck, wheeling them to the elevator, and taking them down to a story below, and thence wheeling them to other sections of the mill, to be left in other hands.

On the day he got hurt, after the truck, heavily loaded with freight, was got upon the floor of the elevator carriage, he undertook, by shipping the elevator,—that is, by putting the machinery in gear which controlled its movement,—to start the carriage with the load downward, when, after repeated attempts, he found that the elevator, or, more strictly, the carriage of the elevator, would not move. He perceived, he thought, that the chain which runs over the drum in the pit of the elevator was loosened from its place, and supposed that the carriage had dropped from its ordinary holdings, and had become suspended by the dogs dropping into the clevis or rack, an arrangement attached to all elevators, by which they may be caught up in case of the ordinary attachments giving way. It turned out, however, that the carriage was held by a bolt or nut projecting through the floor of the carriage, and impinging against the wall of the elevator, where it was held fast in close quarters.

At this point was the mistake of the plaintiff...