Whitehead v. City of Lowell

• Decision Date: 04 March 1878
• Citation: Whitehead v. City of Lowell, 124 Mass. 281 (Mass. 1878)
• Parties: William E. Whitehead v. City of Lowell. Sarah Hallowell v. Same
• Court: Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts

124 Mass. 281

William E. Whitehead v. City of Lowell.

Sarah Hallowell v. Same

Supreme Court of Massachusetts

March 4, 1878

Middlesex. Two actions of tort for personal injuries occasioned by a defect in a way alleged to be "opened and dedicated to the public use" in the defendant city. Answer, a general denial, and that the defendant had received no notice of such defect.

At the trial in the Superior Court, before Rockwell, J., there was evidence that the plaintiffs were driving together, with due care, in a sleigh, about 7 or 8 o'clock in the evening in McIntire Street, and that, when about thirty yards down the street, the sleigh was overturned by coming in contact with some heaps of snow and ice, causing the injuries; that McIntire Street ran from Marshall Street, a public highway to Middlesex Street; that McIntire Street was twenty-two feet six inches wide from fence to fence, at its junction with Marshall Street; that the street, for forty or fifty feet down from Marshall Street, was clear and good travelling that, at the place of the accident, the path made by teams was not in the middle of the street, but bore off to one side; that it was narrower at the place where the accident happened, being there about twenty feet wide; that the front door-steps of the houses on the street, there being two houses upon one side and two upon the other, projected about four feet each into the street; that there was no side walk on either side; that, where it united with Middlesex Street, on one side, there were stairs five or six feet wide, which ran from McIntire Street, and parallel therewith, into the second story of the building at the corner.

There was no evidence that McIntire Street was wrought for travel or was ever laid out as a public way, or that the defendant city had ever worked upon it, but there were tracks left by carriages which had passed over the street; nor was there any evidence who owned the land occupied by the street, or who owned the land on either side of the street. There was no evidence that Middlesex Street was a public street. There was a street lamp on the other side of Marshall Street, opposite the head of McIntire Street.

One Sanderson testified that he had been through McIntire Street about 8 o'clock in the morning of the day of the accident, and saw a great pile of snow, about four feet high on the right hand side of the street, and another pile on the left; that where...