I own a long 40 acres. Does my property line start at the quarter line or the road centerline?
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1) Your profile says you are licensed in Michigan. That seems unlikely for someone asking this question, and should be corrected.
2) In many states, and I don't know about Michigan, rural road right-of-way is usually an easement and owned to the center line along with the adjacent land. That ownership doesn't get you much. An easement is unlikely for state route ROWs which are more often obtained by fee purchase. There are also, rarely, roads that are not centered on section or section fraction (aliquot) lines.
You will need a local expert to really answer your question.
I'm not sure what you mean by a long 40. Is it a half mile long, rather than closer to being a square?
The road might fall anywhere and it is not necessarily tied to the quarter line to which you refer. One would need to search through the County road records to determine how the road was to be laid out. Sometimes, one owner gave up more of the width of the road than the other owner, for example a sixty foot total width with 40 from one owner and only 20 from the other.
The deed is what tells you what is to control the boundaries of your tract.
The GIS maps are worse than useless. It is likely the “quarter” line and road centerline are the same despite what the online map shows.
You will need a survey to tell, my guess is that the road is the 1/16th line but no surveyor can say for sure unless he already has local knowledge. I don't even usually look at lines in the GIS, I only use it to get started for addressing rough idea of owners names and other research.
The information given is not official. It is given only as a point of reference. Your abbreviated legal description posted at the county web page shows an aliquot parcel. It also gives a book and page where the deed was recoded 23 years ago. Quarter lines in general control aliquot descriptions. Even though your property boundary line may be the quarter line if your legal description is aliquot there are other things such as road easements written or unwritten that limit the use. Curious why the question. By the way, using 2640 as the measurement along your east or west lines is very likely not what a survey would show by a few feet to a lot of feet. It would not be unusual for the center of a road to be established on the quarter line but that remains to be determined here. 40 acres exact is also not the area a survey would show. Looks like a beautiful piece of land.
The deed is what tells you what is to control the boundaries of your tract.
You should hire a surveyor to interpret what your deed says, and mark it on the ground for you.
Everything else is speculation and guess work.
Your Welcome,
Dougie
$7,500-$10,000 and a surveyor and all those lines will be marked.
The above answers should demonstrate that your question is not to be answered without additional work.
Pro tip: talk to your neighbors, and see if any of them have had a survey done in the last few years. It could speed things up.
40 acres exact is also not the area a survey would show. Looks like a beautiful piece of land.
Always curious when a person claims they have X amount of acres, but they haven't had a survey or seen a survey, or even called a surveyor.
How would they know how many acres they have? The real estate agent?
How would they know how many acres they have? The real estate agent?
County Records; always accurate; never wrong...
40 acres exact is also not the area a survey would show. Looks like a beautiful piece of land.
Always curious when a person claims they have X amount of acres, but they haven't had a survey or seen a survey, or even called a surveyor.
How would they know how many acres they have? The real estate agent?
Surveys sometimes can't change the legal acreages. That's why the giant BLM dependent resurveys hit a brick wall when they did them in the PRB and tried to change the acreages they were charging for minerals (they got around that by relotting all the 40s with numbers and saying the lots only pertain to their mineral estate, not to the already patented surface land).
If you have a record 40 acres you should be able to stand your ground claiming your land as 40 acres. The local planning department ran into that when they tried to deny sales of two 40's cause they didn't survey as 80 acres which was the minimum. Nope!!
They can't do it, it's 80 acres legally even if it surveys as 78.5.
I also got involved with this question over land transactions between a big rancher who was a long time local attorney and a corporation buying up some of the ranch. He wouldn't let the title people change the acreages of the grants to the survey acreages. Turns out the old attorney was correct.
even a blind old squirrel will dig up a few nuts once in a while
How would they know how many acres they have? The real estate agent?
By looking at the original government survey I suppose.
Surveys sometimes can't change the legal acreages.
Of course, but then we find ourselves in the Clintonesque what is "is" stage of the discussion.
A quarter of a quarter is considered 40 acres no matter in the jurisdictions I have worked in regardless of how many square feet I found.
And of course if the old homesteader sold you "the south 40 acres" as the first sale of his property, no doubt you should get 40 acres (insert exceptions to this statement here).
By looking at the original government survey I suppose.
And of course this is true, as they are without error.
Quarter line. The road is obviously in the wrong place.
