77 Pa. 214 | Pa. | 1874
delivered the opinion of the court,
That the Allegheny river is a navigable stream, and was so recognised before the year 1798, has been shown in Wainwright v.
The bed, bars and shoals of the Allegheny are governed, therefore, by the laws relating to the beds, &c., of navigable streams. This brings us to the question as to the validity of the warrant from the Commonwealth to John W. Dunn and Wm. G-. Poor, for fifteen acres of unimproved land, dated 16th March 1868, and the survey and patent thereupon. The land taken up under the warrant is admitted to be the old channel of the Allegheny river between Wainwright’s Island and the main shore on the southeastern side of the river, lying also between the patent to Conrad Winebiddle, dated December 31st 1787, and the patent to George Wallace, July 22d 1806, surveyed on an order of April 7th 1798, for the island then known as Cork’s Island, three miles above Pittsburg. A special verdict for the plaintiff was rendered, subject to the reserved questions whether any title passed under the patent to Dunn and Poor, and if so, whether it extended to the original low-water lines of the Winebiddle and Wallace patents, or to the low-water lines established by the commissioners under the Act of 16th April 1858, Pamph. L. 326. The decision of the first question in the negative will render any decision on the second question
The beds, gravel and sand-bars of the navigable rivers of this state are not subject to private appropriation under the ordinary system of land laws: Allegheny City v. Read, 12 Harris 39; City of Allegheny v. Nelson, 1 Casey 332; Brandt v. McKeever, 6 Harris 70. This rule grew out of the interests of the state in preserving the navigation of her great rivers, and as a consequence it has always been held that the surveys on navigable streams do not extend the title of the riparian owner beyond the ordinary low-water line, and between it and ordinary high-water line the ownership of the land is subject to the public right of navigation. These lines were considered and their extent defined in Stover v. Jack, 10 P. F. Smith 340; see also Wood v. Appal, 13 P. F. Smith 210; Grant v. White, Id. 271. These positions bring us to the precise question before us, to wit, whether a warrant can be taken out in the ordinary forms of the Land Office to appropriate land made in the channel by filling up, caused by damming up the water in one place and making a street across it in another, raised by embankment under authority of an Act of Assembly. No precedent for such an appropriation has been shown or is known to us, while
The case before us, therefore, does not fall within the ordinary jurisdiction of the Land Office, the land being within the acknowledged channel of the river, and the filling up arising from artificial means, and not by the slow process of natural deposit. The case is exceptional, and therefore requires a particular or special authority of law to open it to general or particular appropriation. No provision is made for such a case. The legal presumption from the locus in quo is that the land is still a part of the bed of the river, until some legal proceeding shall have established the contrary, and a law shall open it to private appropriation. Without this, the land officers, who are ignorant of the peculiar circumstances of the case, may be betrayed into a grant of the river bed prejudicial to the rights of the public. To assume that the land is fast land and not subject to overflow at ordinary high water, might be to make a grant against the fact of the case. Such a ease is not to be governed by the ordinary rule of appropriation, but like an escheat or a forfeiture accruing to the Commonwealth, must be provided for by a law specially applicable to it: Bagley v. Wallace, 16 S. & R. 245; Blaine’s Lessee v. Crawford, 1 Yeates 287; Freytag v. Powell, 1 Wharton 536. The land in question was therefore not subject to be taken up under the warrant to Dunn and Poor, and the judgment must be affirmed.
Affirmed.