Harrison v. Fortner
Harrison v. Fortner
Opinion of the Court
An ejectment petition was filed by the plaintiff in 1963. The case was tried and a verdict directed for the plaintiff on June 21, 1965. A motion for new trial was filed on the usual general grounds on July 17, 1965, and overruled on June 17, 1969. The defendants appealed from such adverse judgment and enumerate the direction of the verdict and the judgment overruling the motion for new trial as error.
The deeds relied upon by both parties were, by agreement, not physically introduced in evidence but excerpts were read on the trial. These deeds showed the plaintiff’s title from 1902 until the time of trial, and evidence of possession was introduced by the plaintiff showing possession by her and her predecessors from 1932. The defendants’ deeds showed a deed from the mother of the plaintiff’s husband to a third party at a time when the record title and possession was in the grandmother of the plaintiff’s husband (also the grantor in the deed to the plaintiff’s husband). A later deed in the defendants’ chain of title was for a lesser acreage which did not include the property in dispute although the deed to the defendants did include the disputed property in the description.
As to possession by the defendants, the testimony of the only defendant who testified shows without dispute that long before the present controversy arose he had some cows on the land but had never been in possession of the land. The plaintiff testified that he had put the cows on the land with her husband’s permission only. It was also undisputed that Harrison had sold some timber from this land for the plaintiff’s husband. The sole evidence of the defendants’ attempted dominion over the land was evidence that shortly before the death of the plaintiff’s husband, the defendant Harrison, while the plaintiff’s husband was sick and could not get out of bed, stopped the cutting of timber on such land.
Under the above evidence, the trial court did not err in directing
Judgment affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.