43 Minn. 150 | Minn. | 1890
November 2, 1883, the plaintiffs executed to the defendant and the daughter of the plaintiff Caroline by a former husband, a deed conveying to them, their heirs and assigns, forever, the farm upon which plaintiffs were then living, in McLeod county. The deed recites that it is in consideration of an agreement which was executed at the same time. The deed contained this clause:
The two instruments were executed together, with reference to the same subject-matter, and are to be considered as though the stipulations in both were in one instrument. The covenants by the grantees in the one we have designated the agreement, especially the covenants to deliver one-third of the crops, to keep the cows and sheep, and to furnish a team and wagon Sundays, certainly constituted a sufficient consideration, not only for that agreement, but for the conveyance which was executed in consideration of that agreement, and of the covenants it contained. The conclusion of the court below, that the conveyance was without consideration, was therefore erroneous.
The instruments, having a consideration to sustain them, vested in the- grantees rights not dependent on the will of the grantors. What the precise character of the grantees’ interests under the two instruments may be, whether an estate for the life of the grantors and the survivor of them, (terminable in the manner specified in the “agreement,”) with the right to a conveyance of the fee by their heirs upon the death of both grantors, or such life-estate with remainder in fee upon the determination of it by the death of both grantors, it is not necessary now to decide. It is enough,-for the purposes of the ease, that the grantors could not terminate such interests without cause. Their notice of revocation was of no effect. It may be conceded that a court of equity would cancel the two instruments for a failure on the part of the grantees to fulfil the covenants on their part, though, as the parties have stipulated a remedy, it may be doubted that it would do so for failure to deliver one-third of the crop. But certainly, before a court would administer the extreme remedy of cancelling the instruments or either of them, and forfeiting the rights of the grantees, it would have to appear that they had failed to perform the covenants in substantial and material particulars, and a waiver of a right to complain on the part of the grantors would defeat the right to such a remedy. The court below, in its findings of fact, specifies a good many particulars in which the grantees failed to perform the covenants, and also finds that such failures were not consented to nor waived by the plaintiffs, but does not find
Order reversed.