Opinion ID: 2257788
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Separate Conveyance of the Flowage Rights

Text: [¶ 14] Dorey cites Ring v. Walker for the proposition that flowage rights are a unique type of easement appurtenant that can be transferred apart from the mill site to which they are appurtenant and made newly appurtenant to a downstream mill site. Contrary to Dorey's argument, however, Ring v. Walker did not directly address flowage rights or their transfer. Ring, rather, concerned two express reservations, made in the context of conveyances, of the rights to build, maintain, and use a log sluice through an upstream mill site for the benefit of certain downstream mill sites. See Ring, 87 Me. at 555-57, 33 A. at 175-76. This Court explicitly declined to treat the reservations as creating an easement appurtenant to any specific downstream mill sites, instead finding them to be in the nature of  a prendre in alieno solo, as in Engel v. Ayer, 85 Maine 448 [27 A. 352]. See id. at 558, 33 A. at 176. [A] profit a prendre in the lands of another, when not granted in favor of a dominant tenement, cannot properly be said to be an easement, but an estate or interest in land itself. Engel v. Ayer, 85 Me. 448, 455, 27 A. 352, 354 (1893) (citation omitted). Accordingly, the rarely addressed sluicing rights at issue in Ring are not analogous to the flowage rights at issue in this case. Ring therefore provides no support for Dorey's proposition that flowage rights pursuant to the Mill Act are a unique type of easement appurtenant that can be independently transferred apart from the mill site to which they are appurtenant. [¶ 15] To the extent that flowage rights to the Foster Pond dam still exist, they are in the nature of an easement appurtenant to the dam site on lot 27 and the sawmill site on lot 11A and cannot exist apart from those lots. See Opinions of the Justices, 118 Me. at 507, 106 A. at 869. Accordingly, the conveyance of flowage rights alone in the May 28, 1980 deed is of no legal effect. The court therefore was correct in concluding that Dorey did not have flowage rights relative to the dam at the outlet of Foster Pond by virtue of that deed.