44 Pa. 27 | Pa. | 1863
The opinion of the court was delivered, by
The complainants have set this case down for hearing on the bill and answers. There is therefore no contest about the facts. They may be briefly summed up as follows: On the 22d day of March 1852, Frederick Lorenz, of the county of Allegheny, executed his last will, whereby he devised and bequeathed his estate, real and personal, to his children and a grandchild, and on the 24th day of October 1854 he died. The will was duly admitted to probate, and on the 22d of November 1854, letters of administration, cum testamento annexo, were granted to Catharine Lorenz, his widow, and to Frederick R. Lorenz, a son, and to James J. Gray. These administrators are three of the defendants in this bill. They caused an inventory of the personal estate of the testator to be made and filed. Included in this inventory was the testator’s interest in a firm which had conducted the manufacture of glass at the Penn Glass Works, and that interest was appraised at $56,000. It was subsequently sold by Catharine Lorenz and James J. Gray, two of the administrators, to Frederick R. Lorenz, the third administrator, who was the son of the testator, and who had been a partner with him in the firm. To secure the purchase-money, the vendors took a judgment-bond from the purchaser in the sum of $121,700, conditioned for the payment of $62,350, caused judgment to be entered upon it, and execution to be issued. Under this execution, all the personal property of the said Frederick R. Lorenz was sold, and Catharine Lorenz and James J. Gray, the plaintiffs in the judgment, became the purchasers for the sum of $29,526.92, paying for it by a credit on their judgment. The administrators then filed an account of their administration, wherein they charged themselves with the entire interest of the testator in the property of the firm above described, which was valued in the inventory at $56,000, and they claimed a credit for $29,709.87, the price or supposed value of the personal property which they had purchased at the sheriff’s sale aforesaid, and which they thus treated as assets of the estate of the deceased testator. This account was referred by the Orphans’ Court to an auditor, and pursuant to exceptions urged on behalf
This assignment was duly recorded; the assignee entered upon the duties of the trust thus created, and, under the power expressed in the deed, converted a large portion of the property into money, and paid such of the debts incurred for labour during Frederick R. Lorenz’s agency as are preferred by law,
Such are the material facts as they appear in the case. It is
In the case of Lothrop v. Wightman, decided on the 13th of January 1862, 5 Wright 297, a case in which apart of this transaction came under review, it was said that, looking at no more than we had on that record, we could not doubt that the administrators of Frederick Lorenz purchased in their representative capacity at the sale under the execution against Frederick R. Lorenz, and that the effect of the sale was to revest the property, in the estate of the decedent. Holding such to have been the effect of the sale, we said also that it was a gross irregularity in the administrators to assign to Wightman assets which the law required them to administer. There are other facts upon the present record, but we do not propose now to consider their legal effect, nor the equities which grow out of them. They may prove of importance in the distribution of the fund now in the hands of the assignee, when distribution shall come to be made. Whether, in view of all the facts now appearing, the whole fund in the hands of Thomas Wightman belongs to the estate of the deceased testator free from all liability to those whose labour and materials have contributed to swell it from $29,526.92, the price hidden for it at sheriff’s sale, to nearly one hundred thousand dollars, or whether, if the devisees and legatees can now maintain that the property purchased by the administrators at the sheriff’s sale remains the property of the testator’s estate, they are entitled to any more than the property itself, or its value with interest, or the profits which the administrators made, if any, in trading with it, are questions which we do not intend now to answer. They will come up for adjudication in the proper time and in the proper place. The Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny county has the whole matter in hand. The assignee has filed his account in that court, and the whole fund was there to be marshalled before this bill was filed Tb U-' court has equity powers as large as our own. It can decree the fund to whomsoever it belongs in equity. Whatever rights the complainants have, may be asserted there, as efficaciously as they can be here. As the jurisdiction of that court over the property in controversy had attached before the present bill was filed, there is no propriety in our interference in any other way than on appeal from its decree. And this becomes most apparent when we note that those claimants upon that fund, whose labour and property contributed to swell it, the creditors in whose favour the primary trust in the assignment was created, are not parties to this bill, and a decree that the assignment is void, and ordering the prop
And now, to wit, February 2d, 1863, this cause having been set down by the complainants for hearing, on bill and answer, came on for argument and was duly argued by counsel. Whereupon it is ordered, adjudged, and decreed that the bill of the complainant be dismissed out of this court with costs, but without prejudice to their right or the right of either of them to assert in the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny county, any claim they or either of them may have to the property described in the bill as in the hands of Thomas Wightman, the defendant.