I wrote a hand-written letter.
The purpose of this letter was to introduce myself and my family to the landowners of the property immediately north of Pine Grove. I will call her Mrs. R.
I thought that I was pretty cordial and did a fine job of letting Mrs. R. know who we were and what our intent was for the property, all while maintaining adequate OPSEC (Operations Security, aka a low profile).
Well, her response finally came (turns out the she sent her first response to the wrong address and her letter came back. Oh well, it happens and at least she was nice enough to include another note to that effect.)
Anyhow, Mrs. R. starts off by telling us that she has no intent to sell her acreage nor does she wish to grant us permission to access Pine Grove through her property. (That is fine with me, and I didn't tell her that our Western neighbors had already given us permission.)
She also went on and on in another paragraph about how she doesn't trespass, nor does she care for them, and that she inspected her property recently, found some missing fence and called the Sheriff.
She ends her letter by chastising me for purchasing a land-locked parcel of land and then makes the assumption that I must be related to the seller of the parcel. Well, she is wrong, and my overall impression of her is that she's a bitter old woman. Too bad.
So, I guess that I will write a letter back to Mrs. R. and let her know that I respect her decisions and I might even add that I found a dead deer on Pine Grove and I hope that she wasn't the one who killed it.....or I may just decide not to sink to her level and leave that little jab out of it.
I have since consulted with a land survey company from the area and asked them about easements to the property. This is what they had to say,
One way is to have us write an access easement description over aWell, I think that our access from the Western neighbors property will be just fine and will certainly be cheaper and less hassle than making a legal fight out of this.
strip of land, across an adjoining land owner, and see if they will
grant you rights. Basically the adjoining land will have to sign for
the strip, based on some agreement (money, closing title).
If an adjoining land owner is unwilling to sign an easement or
agreement, you can consult attorney and go through the legal process
to see if you can get rights through the court system.
Either way, you will need some sort of easement description for the
strip of land that you will use for ingress and egress.
I think that the Western neighbors would be willing to make a legal easement for us if I say that they could continue to hunt on Pine Grove while we are away.
Of course a willing neighbor is the best!!! Yet if she has the most direct access to state or county maintained roads and/or utilities she ultimately will be without a legal leg to stand on in the end. Missouri has property rights laws that require owners to allow easement access.
ReplyDeleteNot that the land owners were the ones these easement laws were passed for. They are actually there to allow utility companies to basically do what they want, but still they can be useful for landlocked property owners.
Yeah, agreed.
ReplyDeleteWe will have a chat with the western neighbors the next time we go down. Let them know that we're wanting something legal written in. Word of mouth is great, but they may move away some day and the next neighbors might not want to honor such an agreement.