133 Mass. 529 | Mass. | 1882
The notice required by the St. of 1877, c. 234, § 3, as preliminary to the commencement of an action for bodily injury or damage to property against a town, occasioned through
The notice described the place of the injury as being upon a highway “leading-from Gardner to Templeton called the Shoddy Road,” and the cause of injury as proceeding from “ a defect in said road near.the blanket mills of R. S. Frost Si Co., the defect being large stones 'in said road or way, the said stones being at or near a sluiceway in said road.” This notice the defendant, contends to have been misleading and ambiguous, for the reason that the stones were set up as guards at the sluiceway, forming a part of the culvert thrown across it, and bounded the travelled part of the way on - either side. There were no other stones in the road for a distance of twenty rods on either side of the sluiceway. There could be no doubt that these were the stones which the plaintiff alleged as the cause of his injury, and, although they are spoken of as large stones in the road, this is not an assertion that they are.in the-travelled part of the road; the description would equally apply to stones which too narrowly enclosed and- bounded the road as intended to be travelled. Their location was made definite by the sluiceway, and by the further fact that there were no other stones in its vicinity.
The place was not alleged in the notice to be in Gardner, but, as there was a place answering the description there, in a notice to the authorities of Gardner, it could not be doubted that the place referred to was in that town. Savory v. Haverhill, 132 Mass. 324. Nor was it necessary to set forth in the notice the time of day when the injury took place.
We have heretofore said, through Mr. Justice Morton: “A notice given under the statute ought not to be construed with technical strictness. It is sufficient if it gives to the officers of the town information with substantial certainty as to the time and place of the injury, and as to the character and nature of the defect which caused it, so as to be of aid to them in investigating the question of the liability of the town.” Spellman v. Chicopee, 131 Mass. 443. The notice in the present case has all these requisites. Exceptions overruled.