Court Opinion

ID: 9832949
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 22:19:33.27397+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:56.138545
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
[6] In appellant’s motion for rehearing, the complaint is seriously made that we failed to discuss the first assignment of error, but silently overruled the same. This assignment involves the proposition that, having acquired an easement by prescription on a part of the land of plaintiff, defendant would not lose the easement by pulling up its poles and placing them across the Et. Worth & Denver City Railroad track, on another portion of said land — that it was a mere deviation of the use ■of the land. The following authorities are cited, under the assignment, in support of the proposition: Farnum v. Platt, 25 Mass. (8 Pick.) 339, 19 Am. Dec. 330; Leonard v. Leonard, 84 Mass. (2 Allen) 543; Haley v. Colcord, 59 N. H. 7, 47 Am. Rep. 176; Jarstadt v. Smith, 51 Wis. 96, 8 N. W. 29; Wright v. Willis (Ky.) 63 S. W. 991; Durkee v. Jones, 27 Colo. 159, 60 Pac. 618.
We considered the assignment on the original hearing, but thought the authorities were so apparently inapplicable to the condition in this record we overruled the same, without discussion. The first case (Farnum v. Platt, 25 Mass. [8 Pick.] 339, 19 Am. Dec. 330, supra) decides that where one has a right of way over another’s land, and the owner of the land stops the way which is in use, the other party will be justified in going over another part of the land. The remaining authorities announce the same principle, based upon a similar condition, with a variation in the Kentucky and Colorado cases, above cited. Those two cases hold that where an easement is closed by an agreement with the •owner of the land, in consideration of which a new easement is opened, the closing of a new easement, as a right of way, would not be permitted without a reopening of the old.
First, defendant did not prove, nor plead an easement by prescription; second, if defendant had pleaded and proved an easement, but moved-off of that part of the land upon an improper demand to get off the land, his right was to retain the old easement, not to establish the same easement across the railroad track upon a different portion of said property. There was no agreement to open up a new easement; nor would the demand of the plaintiff to get off the land, which defendant would not have had to have done, be such an obstruction to the easement, as in the cases cited, which would create the same right in another part of plaintiff’s estate. The act of obstruction in those cases created the necessity for a different mode of travel. If defendant had an easement by prescription in this case, he moved in obedience to a demand he did not have to obey. Such a demand is not an obstruction physically, nor theoretically, creating a necessity for deviation.
The motion is overruled.