Court Opinion

ID: 9642260
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:53:10.336533+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:45.299479
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Justice,
dissenting.
I cannot join in the judgment of the majority announced this day.
I am persuaded by the logic of the Report of Referee that he reached the correct result. I am buttressed in that view by the circumstance that, after his Report was challenged in Superior Court, that court accepted his Report and adopted the Referee’s conclusions. I am reinforced in that view by our Court’s statement in State v. Mullen, 97 Me. 331, 338, 54 A. 841, 845 (1903), that a grantee under such a deed as those at issue here held the right to cut timber on the reserved lots “until incorporation of the township” with no suggestion by our Court that the grantee, or his successor in interest, was limited to the timber existing at the time of the grant.1
It is my individual view that we should affirm the judgment of the Superior Court.
At the outset all agree that the interests in the reserved lots conveyed by the several deeds under which these Plaintiffs derived their titles were profits á prendre.2 The majority agrees there is no ambiguity in the language of these instruments. The controversy, then, is over whether the timber interests created thereby were limited to timber in existence at the time of the respective grants.
I submit that the interests were not so limited.
In the first place, notwithstanding that “standing timber,” “timber standing upon such real estate” and “trees or grass standing or growing on such lands” were familiar terms to legislators and conveyancers in that long ago day,3 I find it significant that neither the Legislature of 1850 in authorizing these grants nor the State Land Agent in making these grants chose to limit them to standing timber. Here the broad language of the grant was:
the right to cut and carry away the timber and grass from the reserved lots ... said right ... to continue until the said Township or tract shall be incorporated or organized for Plantation purposes and no longer.
That right continued, I submit, not only until the timber then standing was harvested, but until the occurrence of the terminat*502ing event — the incorporation or organizing of the municipality.
Such an interpretation of the instruments is consistent with the rule of the Massachusetts case which was already on the books when the State Land Agent gave this series of deeds. Clap v. Draper, 4 Mass. 266, 267 (1808). In that case the conveyance was of the right to cut and carry away all trees and timber “standing and growing on said land forever.” Speaking through Chief Justice Parsons, the Massachusetts court ruled that such language effectively comprehended not merely the trees and timber then standing but “all the trees and timber standing and growing on the close forever.”
In the second place, as we interpret the language of the deeds in controversy we must look to the four corners of each instrument. In a possible eagerness to reach a result we cannot consider only a part of the language and disregard the rest. Today’s majority concludes that the grantees under these deeds and their successors in interest were entitled to harvest only a single crop. Do they limit these parties to a single crop of grass? When they say that the terminating event fixes, not the scope, but the duration of the interest conveyed by the deed, are they suggesting that the only grass conveyed was the crop then in existence, but that the grantee might have upward of a century to harvest that crop? It suffices to say that the same language is used in the instrument with reference to the timber and the grass. Neither in P.L. 1850, ch. 196, nor in the deeds given by the State Land Agent is any distinction drawn between the two crops. We should interpret this provision of a terminating event in a manner that is as rational for one crop as it is for the other.
In the third place, I am concerned over the difficulties ahead as a result of the majority’s conclusion that of all the timber and grass now standing on the reserved lots the Plaintiffs own only the timber and grass which was in existence at the time the deeds were given to their predecessors in interest. A few trees may obviously be that old. Vastly more trees may obviously be young growth. In between stand trees the age of which is not so apparent and which may well be the subject of controversy. These are difficulties which would be avoided under the judgment of the Superior Court.
In the fourth place, I am troubled by what almost appears to be an attempt to rewrite the history of that turbulent era in the Maine woods. Timber and meadow grass on thousands of acres were being lost to forest fires, not all of natural origin. Pillage of these reserved lots by trespassers was commonplace. The State Land Agent was selling in a competitive market because, early in this period at least, Massachusetts was still disposing of the lands in Maine which belonged to that commonwealth, and sales were being made from other large tracts, such as the Bingham purchases.4 The State was, as the Referee noted, eager to get title as far as practicable into private parties who might be able to deal more effectively with the continuing problem of trespassers. Nevertheless, the majority’s opinion implies that experienced businessmen of that period were ready to pay good money for a single crop of timber and a single crop of grass, not with a view to harvesting each crop at the optimum season, but sometime over a period of several decades.
Finally, I am disturbed by the majority’s declaring that a conveyance of cutting rights without more conveys no rights beyond the crop then in existence, and then citing one Idaho case for the proposition which the majority would make the rule of this case. M. & I. Timber Co. v. Hope Silver-Lead Mines, Inc., 91 Idaho 638, 640, 428 P.2d 955, 957 (1967). The Plaintiff in that case, however, claimed under a deed to “all that standing timber.” In the deeds being interpreted in the case at bar there was no limitation to timber standing- or to *503grass growing at the times of the several grants.
To me the broad language of the grant, set forth above, is clear and unambiguous. I would give it its plain meaning.

. At issue in that case decided some 50 years after the enactment of our 1850 statute was the right to cut timber on the reserved lots after a portion of the township had been incorporated as the town of Millinocket.

. A profit á prendre is a right by one to take a part of the soil or produce of the land of another. Beckwith v. Rossi, 157 Me. 532, 534, 175 A.2d 732, 735 (1961). It may be a personal right, and therefore held in gross, or it may be a right held as an appurtenance to other land. It is a license coupled with an easement. Restatement, Property § 399(b) (1944); 3 H. Tiffany, Real Property, § 427, et seq. (3d ed. 1939).

.See, e. g., Clap v. Draper, 4 Mass. 266 (1808); Erskine v. Plummer, 7 Me. 447, 450 (1831); R.S., 1840, ch. 3, §§ 5, 8, 41; ch. 112, § 38; P.L. 1844, ch. 123, § 19.

. See R. Wood, A History of Lumbering in Maine, 1820-1861, ch. III “The Timberlands” (1971); D. Smith, A History of Lumbering in Maine, 1861-1960, ch. 7 “Lumbering and Land Sales — 1860-1890” (1972).