Court Opinion

ID: 9831221
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 20:55:59.67934+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:32.753274
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Appellant very earnestly insists in his motion for rehearing that this court erred in the conclusion expressed in our original opinion that there is no evidence raising the issue of the location of the lines of the Johnson Hunter grant along the bay áiore, at the time the original survey was made, at such position that would not include within the boundaries of the grant any portion of the land in controversy.
We do not think the conclusion complained of, if erroneous, is material, since the statute under which this suit is instituted has no application to any public lands other than those set apart to the public free schools.
As we interpret the statute setting apart to the public free school fund all of the unappropriated public domain, the land here involved was expressly excepted from such appropriation.
This statute (article 5416, Revised Statutes, 1925) expressly excepts from the grant to the permanent school fund of the state lands “included in lakes, bays and islands along the Gulf of Mexico within tidewater limits.” If any part of the land in controversy was included within the original bound'aries of the Hunter survey, and, by the operation of natural changes in the ebb and flow of the tides, it became submerged and so remained for a number of years, ánd by a similar process of nature it was subsequently placed above the ordinary high tides, it would not become public land, but would belong to the owner of that portion of the Hunter survey of which it was originally a part. Fisher v. Barber (Tex. Civ. App.) 21 S.W.(2d) 569. If, as claimed by appellant, the land was made by deposits thrown into the bay from excavations of the ship channel, it is clearly excepted in the statute above mentioned.
If the opinion in the Fisher Case, supra (in which no writ of error seems to have been sued out), is unsound, and in the circumstances shown by the evidence in that case the strip of land restored by a natural change in the operations of the tides became part of the public domain, it is just as clearly excepted from the grant made by the act appropriating to the permanent school fund of the state unappropriated public domain.
The motion for rehearing is refused.
Refused.