M.E.J., Inc. v. Township of West Pottsgrove
M.E.J., Inc. v. Township of West Pottsgrove
Opinion of the Court
Opinion by
M.E.J., Inc., a corporation, and Joseph Rivlin and Emanuel Rivlin, the owners of the stock of M.E.J., Inc., have appealed from an order of the Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County, dismissing their exceptions to, and adopting as the final decree, a decree nisi requiring the appellants to remove obstructions from Grosstown Road and enjoining them from future obstructions of the road.
The equity suit which lead to the final order appealed from was instituted by the Township of West Pottsgrove by complaint in equity in which it alleged that Grosstown Road was opened as a public road by decree of the Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County in 1868; that the road has never been vacated and remains a public road of the Township; that Grosstown Road is the boundary line between properties owned, respectively, by the defendant, M.E.J., Inc. and the defendants Joseph and Emanuel Rivlin, tenants in common; and that the appellants have erected barricades across the road. The appellants answered denying that Grosstown Road is a public road, asserting that if it was ever a public road it had been abandoned as such and that they, the appellants, have continuously obstructed the road for 21 years acquiring thereby the right to do so by adverse possession.
The appellants’ complaints are directed exclusively to the Chancellor’s findings of fact. They say that the Chancellor should not have accepted the location
The appellants further say that the Township failed to prove that Grosstown Road had been physically opened within a period of five years after the completion of the road proceedings in 1868, as required by Section 2013 of The First Class Township Code, Act of June 24, 1931, P.L. 1206, as amended, 53 P.S. §57013, and that the 1868 proceedings should therefore have been declared to be void. It seems to be their position that absent direct evidence of the road’s having been opened during the five years immediately following 1868, the proceedings undertaken that year must be deemed to be void. The Chancellor noted the testimony of a number of longtime residents describing their use of the road with vehicles from as early as 1920 until 1929 and for pedestrial travel thereafter and his finding based on the' Township’s engineering evidence that the road is in the location described in the 1868 road proceedings, and then made the perfectly proper inference that the road had been open within five years after the 1868 proceedings.
We have carefully studied the record in this case. Judge Vogel’s findings are more than adequately supported, they are overwhelmingly supported by the record, not only where they were derived from the unrefuted testimony of neighborhood witnesses who used the road for more than 50 years, but also where
Order affirmed.
Obdeb
And Now, this 23rd day of May, 1979, the final order of the Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County made March 27, 1978 is affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.