Case ID: ky_2/html/0201-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

NOVEMBER 11, 1802.
    John O’Bannon v. John Jackson.
    
      Opon an appeal from the judgment of the County^ Court of Woodford county.
    
    1. None of the provisions of the act of 179? respecting mills apply to the erection of a mill in a town.
    2. In an application to the county court for license to erect a mill and dam, it must appear that the land in the bed of the stream, where the mill is to be erected, belongs either to the applicant or to the commonwealth.
    
      3. In an inquisition upon a writ of ad quod damnum to condemn land for the ahuttal of a mill dam, the jury must locate and circumscribe, by metes and bounds, the land condemned, and must also find its value.
   On a careful examination of this case^ and of the law upon which it is founded, it does not appear to the court that any of the provisions of the law extend to the erection of a mill in a town. But, if the court should be mistaken in their construction of the act of assembly respecting mills, still, it is manifest, from an inspection of the record, that the law has not been pursued, inasmuch as the record does not show that the property in the bed of the branch was in the commonwealth, or in the applicant, without which the county court ought not to have given leave to erect the mill. Independent of these objections to the proceedings, it appears by the inquisition of the jury that the value of the acre of land against which the applicant proposed to abut his dam was not taken into consideration conformably to the requisition of the writ under which the jury was summoned, and should have acted. Nor was the said acre of land proposed for the abutment of the applicant’s mill-dam located and circumscribed by certain metes and bounds as the law and the authority under which the jury acted indispensably required.

For the errors above stated, it is the opinion of the court, that the judgment of the county court be reversed with costs, which is ordered to the said court.