Newhall v. Chase
Newhall v. Chase
Opinion of the Court
The opinion of the court was delivered by
Elbridge Chase, the owner of an apple orchard, contracted for the sale of its crop to Sylvan Newhall. Under the contract the seller was to pick the apples and the buyer was to sort and pack them. The buyer was required to advance '$500, which was to apply to the last apples delivered. The parties entered upon the performance of their agreement and for about two weeks apples were picked, sorted, packed, delivered, accepted, shipped and paid for. Then a controversy arose, the seller claiming that the buyer was not furnishing a sufficient force to handle the crop properly, and was rejecting more fruit as culls than the contract permitted. The buyer claimed that the attitude of the seller was unwarranted and amounted to a refusal to allow him to proceed under the contract. He therefore ceased all attempt to do so. The owner then marketed the remainder of the crop himself. Newhall, having paid for all the apples he had received, sued to recover the $500 which he had deposited, asserting
For the purpose of showing the number of apples that remained on hand when the plaintiff quit work, the defendant offered in evidence memorandums of the number of barrels and boxes subsequently hauled away from the orchard, made by a witness as the work proceeded. Objections to this and to other similar evidence were sustained, and a reversal is asked solely on this ground. The writings offered were not rendered incompetent by the fact that the witness at the time of the trial had no independent recollection concerning the matter to which they related. (Garden City v. Heller, 61 Kan. 767; 1 Wig. Ev. §§734, 754.) But even if they ought to have been admitted in evidence they were not so material as to make their rejection a ground for reversing the judgment. They would have been highly important if the jury had found that the buyer had wrongfully abandoned the contract, for in that case it would have been necessary to determine the amount the seller had lost thereby, and that depended upon the quantity of apples remaining to be marketed. The verdict, however, was based upon findings that the. unreasonable eonduct of the seller prevented the performance of the contract, and in that view of the case the amount of his loss was immaterial.
But the appellant insists that the excluded evidence had a bearing upon the question of who was responsible for the nonperformance of the contract. His argument runs thus: The quantity of apples remaining on
The judgment is affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.