Robert Hill, post: 410556, member: 378 wrote: Freshet is one of my favorite terms for describing flooding as a result of an extreme rain event when the creek overflows it banks.
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance ... through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality ... and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely ... that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time."
Henry David Thoreau
At 399 & 400 the Greenfield Court cites 194 Ala. 554 which apparently adopts the rule stated in Corpus Juris (the predecessor to C.J.S.-Corpus Juris Secundom):
Briefly the law is that adjoining proprietors of lands having a non-navigable stream as a boundary line between them take each to the middle or thread of the stream. Tallassee Falls Mfg. Co. v. State, 194 Ala. 554, 69 So. 589. ÛÏWhere, by a sudden and violent or artificial change, the channel or shore on which riparian or littoral lands are bounded is shifted, the *400 boundaries of such lands are unaffected, and remain in their original position; but where the change is gradual and imperceptible, whether caused by accretion, reliction, or encroachment, the boundaries shift with the shifting of the channel or shore. If the land of the riparian proprietor is increased he is not accountable for the gain, and if it is diminished he has no recourse for the loss. *** It is only when the change in the stream is sudden, violent, or visible that the title remains the same. It is not enough that the change may be discerned by comparison at two distinct points of time. It must be perceptible when it takes place. The test as to what is gradual and imperceptible in the sense of the rule is that, although the witnesses may see from time to time that progress has been made, they could not perceive it while the process was going on.Û 9 C.J. p. 195, å¤ 82.
I have the older version of Tallassee Falls Mfg. Co. v. State which was reversed by 194 Ala. 554 which I don't have. Odd that the old, reversed, case comes up in the Digests but not the newer cite. The principles that Westlaw is citing the older, reversed one, may not have been overturned when they reversed which would explain citing a reversed case.
I quoted the rule from C.J.S. in a post above.
