23 Mo. 532 | Mo. | 1856
delivered the opinion of the court.
The question presented by the record for our determination does not, in our opinion, involve the necessity of an examination of the correctness of the survey of the outboundary of St. Louis, made by the officers of the general government. We will therefore proceed at once to an examination of the point on
In all the litigation which has grown out of that act — and it is believed that it has given rise to more than any law, state or federal, which has been in force here — an instance is not recollected in which it was maintained that a survey of the outboun-dary of the village of St. Louis was a muniment of the title of a private claimant to a lot confirmed by the act of 1812. In-habitation, cultivation or possession prior to the 20th of December, 1803, by an inhabitant of the village, was all that has been supposed was necessary to be proved in order to maintain or defend an ejectment for a common field lot claimed under the act of 1812. That act, in its terms, requires no such thing. The confirmation of the claims of individuals is made directly and absolutely, without any reference to an outboundary. The language of the act is, that the rights, titles and claims to town or village lots, common field lots, &c., shall be and the same are hereby confirmed to the inhabitants of the respective towns or villages. Afterwards, it is made the duty of the principal deputy surveyor to survey the outboundary lines of the several towns or villages, so as to include the out-lots, common j lots and commons thereto respectively common field lot belonging to one of the er is confirmed by the act, can the failure of thefe to include it in his survey take away the claimfl The fact that no survey of the outboundar|$ twenty- eight years after the passage of the deemed conclusive on this question. It has alwu posed that the idea of an outboundary was suggested by the reservation made by the act for the use of schools, which being limited to one-twentieth of the area within the boundary, it was necessary in order to ascertain which were the lands reserved for schools. Had there been no reservation for schools, no outboundary would have been thought of, nor would any have
In the case of Kissell v. The Public Schools, (18 Howard, 218,) the Supreme Court of the United States says : “It is proper to remark that we are here dealing with the survey marked ‘I’ (which is the survey in question) and ascertaining its effect as regards the lands granted and allotted for school purposes, and are not to be understood as having expressed any opinion on the effect of this outboundary survey on titles situated beyond it and claimed to have been confirmed by the act of 1812, or which were subject to be identified by the recorder of land titles under the act of 1824.” Adopting the opinion which is here only intimated, we, on the
The other judges concurring, the judgment will be reversed, and the cause remanded.