In the 19th century, when roads were opened in Central Texas, sometimes the land within the road was taken entirely from the land of one owner or another, not run centered on the line between them. The result was a road alignment that looked something like this:
Naturally, the road lines weren't always immediately fenced, so the fences built later don't sometimes reflect the theoretical scheme that the Jury of View had in mind when the road was laid out.
One thing that I haven't made a study of is what criteria were used in determining the distance from the corner at which to start the transition from one side to the other. I'd think that after the middle 1870's, when wire fencing became common, the main criterion was making the angle close enough to 180° that a fence could be built without any special bracing of the angle post.
Interesting question Kent. I think you may be right on the 180 deg. criteria. I can't tell what the scale is there, but I would assume that wagons wouldn't be traveling fast enough to be a consideration, unless the jogs were really acute.
While you are correct in your assessment of the fact that the land could have been taken from one landowner only, I seem to remember a line from M.E. Spry that said that, by statute, all county courts had the right to put any road down any property line. This may have been repealed by now.
In my experience, where there are roads near the property lines, they took from each landowner equally, except in one case I just did where TXdot apparently took all of the land from just one landowner. It was an odd case for sure for this part of the world.
> While you are correct in your assessment of the fact that the land could have been taken from one landowner only, I seem to remember a line from M.E. Spry that said that, by statute, all county courts had the right to put any road down any property line. This may have been repealed by now.
While Commissioners Court had the right to establish a road, a landowner also had the right to object and to ask damages. So in practice, the Juries of View tried to make sure that landowners shared the burden of losing land to a road more or less equally. They also located roads in ways that would minimize damages such as loss of cultivated land or improvements. The County Commissioners were of course elected officials and so were also obliged to be seen to act in a way that was understood to be fair.
> In my experience, where there are roads near the property lines, they took from each landowner equally.
I suspect that reflects land use, i.e. few cultivated fields or significant improvements, that would affect location at the time that the roads were established.
> I can't tell what the scale is there, but I would assume that wagons wouldn't be traveling fast enough to be a consideration, unless the jogs were really acute.
Yes, most of the county roads opened by order of Commissioners Court were established before motorized traffic, so the modern geometric considerations of road design didn't apply. That sketch above is more schematic and isn't to scale.
Just thinking about how the road would have been marked out, though, it seems pretty likely that the angle points on the tract boundaries would have been marked first and at equal distances from the corner. Then, for 19th century needs, the angle point on the side of the new road opposite that on the tract line might have just be located on a perpendicular to the tract line rather than laying off the angle bisector.
On some old roads that haven't been widened, you can still find old cedar stakes that correspond with what was most likely the road layout and I have the recollection of having more than once seen old evidence reflecting the layout described above.
I've seen it both ways. A smooth transition as shown above and an abrupt, sharp turn, followed by a second sharp turn. Very dangerous today but probably OK when first laid out.
Many of the county roads started out as convenience roads that were traveled by the local people to the towns. They usually went down the section or aliquot lines and sometimes were not centered on those lines and often were as Kent's sketch shows them. risky to assume that all were centered on GLO lines. Need to check the road records and see what the original road petition says and what the courts finally approved after the road commissioners report was completed. Then we have migration of those roads for various reasons, which sometimes were handled by creating a road tract in fee, those are not centralized in the records and are only determined by deed research where the document is found or noted as an exception in another document.
jud
Need room for big teams, 20 horse comes to mind, for the team to sidestep and keep the wagon on the road. Took a lot of room to turn a wagon around a sharp turn.
jud
Actually, a State, county, city or some sort of public entity which has the legal authority to do so, can "take" someone's land for public usage through the doctrine of Eminent Domain, but according to the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that entity must pay you a fair price for that land, or the usage thereof.
Unfortunately, I see instances occurring all the time where the landowners don't even bother to make the entity pay for that taking.
> Need room for big teams, 20 horse comes to mind, for the team to sidestep and keep the wagon on the road. Took a lot of room to turn a wagon around a sharp turn.
> jud
Jud,
I had been thinking the same thing.
