84 Pa. 472 | Pa. | 1877
delivered the opinion of the court,
Erom the report of the viewers appointed to adjust the damages and contributions payable and chargeable to the owners of land along the extension of Packer street, in the city of Williamsport, A. Boyd Cummings, the plaintiff below and here, was the only appellant. When the issue was directed by the Court of Common Pleas, there was no other controversy than that between the plaintiff and the city. The second section of the supplementary borough Act of the 22d of April 1856, made every report of viewers to assess damages and contributions final and conclusive on all parties after approval and confirmation by the proper Court of Quarter Sessions. The only control over the action- of the viewers consisted in the power of the court to modify the report “ on the hearing of such parties as should choose to contest the same.” The Act of the 15th of January 1866, incorporating the city of Williamsport, made no change in the law regulating the opening and extension of the highways of the municipality. The tenth section preserved all unsupplied statutes, ordinances, by laws, rules and
But while the form of the issue embraced unnecessary parties, the actual question remained unchanged. The plaintiff’s land had been appropriated for the highway, and he claimed damages for the injury alleged to have been sustained. In the course of the trial, the defendants offered to prove by Joseph Gilmore that “ after the plaintiff had plotted his land and located on said plot the extension of Packer street at the point where the same is now located, and before the witness had plotted his on the north side of and adjoining
As the whole evidence of Mr. Gilmore was incompetent, discussion of the point raised by the sixth and seventh assignments of error would be superfluous. But it may be said, that anjnadvertent statement to the jury, that an agreement on the part of Mr. Cummings to open the street at his own expense, had been testified to, when no testimony as to such an agreement had been given, would be capable of affecting the interests of the plaintiff in a most damaging and disastrous way.
In The Shenango and Allegheny Railroad Co. v. Braham, 29 P. F. Smith 447, the judgment was reversed because the jury had been instructed to regard only such advantages and disadvantages from the road of the defendants as resulted to the plaintiff as a farmer, and to his land as a farm. In entering the judgment of this court, it was held that everything that gives intrinsic value to land is a proper consideration in estimating its market value. The rule by which the jury in this case were instructed to ascertain the plaintiffs’ damages, was entirely accurate, and the fourth and fifth assignments of error, in which that instruction is complained of, are unsustained.
Judgment reversed, and venire facias de novo awarded.