Court Opinion

ID: 9833552
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 22:49:29.928968+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:44:04.242672
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Appellant does not complain of the judgment of the court below as being against the preponderance of the evidence, but takes the ground that its judgment should be reversed and rendered. To render judgment for appellant here, we would have to find that the evidence was such that, had the case been tried to a jury, it would have been error for the court not to have instructed a verdict for appellant. Irrespective of the weight to be given it, appel-lees’ evidence was that they had never abandoned the 40 acres as their homestead, and always expected to return to it. The fact that they had resided in the house which they removed to the lot belonging to them in Eagle Lake, and continued to reside in it after it was removed to Eagle Lake, did not necessarily destroy the homestead character of the 40-acre tract. It is not true that the homestead exemption attached, before the removal of the house, primarily to the house, and secondarily to the 40 acres. On the contrary, it attached to the 40 acres and the improvements thereon situated as a . whole. After the removed residence was detached from the 40-acre tract, the other residence still remained there attached, and this “un-detached” residence was as much under the shield and protection of the homestead exemption as had been the house in which appellees resided at the time of its detachment. This, because it was truly a part of the 40-acre homestead as was the detached residence before its detachment. There is nothing in the act of removing the excess residence off of the homestead to automatically denude the 40-acre tract of its homestead character. The same process by which our Supreme Court reasoned in • Cullers v. James, cited in our opinion, that the homestead exemption survived to protect a house, when the head of a family lost title to realty to which it' attached, would ' argue for the survival of the homestead exemption to protect the 40-acre tract and. residence that still remains on it, after the extra residence was removed. We do not base our affirmance of the judgment, however, on metaphysical and doubtful reasoning: for in this place we have good cause to know the ease with which the worse can be made seem the better reason. We plant ’ our affirmance ón the sure fact that in this case there was sufficient evidence — question of preponderance aside — to make the question, of whether there had been an abandon-, ment of the 40-acre tract as a homestead, one for a jury. The most that can be said of the reasoning of appellant, both on the hearing and on the motion for rehearing, is that it is a strong argument why appellees’ claim, not to have abandoned the 40-acre tract as their homestead, should not be accepted as true. The fact remains, however, that appellees introduced evidence on the trial that makes the issue of whether they abandoned the 40-acre tract as a homestead one of fact; and that there is no evidence before us of any act done by appellees which destroyed the homestead character with which the 40-acre tract had been invested, as a matter of law. The motion for rehearing is overruled.
Overruled.