paghat wrote:

Forty-odd years ago in a rural neighborhood, there was a road that passed
right down a property line with one property to the south & four
properties to the north, so five households used that one looooong private
dirt road. A new owner of the largest property upon discovering her
property line encompassed about half the width of the road put a fence
right down the middle (which forced her to widen her side of the road to
get to her house, so it hardly benefited her any). This left three out of
five properties with no access to their houses further back along the
divided road. It went to court on the idea that after 30 years of
continuous right of way, it was by then a public road. But the case was
lost, the fence remained, & the abused property owners just had to widen
the road further onto their own properties (with the continued mutual
agreement that everyone could use it, which I suppose was even then not a
deeded right of way, & some new owner could've refused to honor if they'd
been assholes too). The anger & hatreds that resulted from the case were
permanent & the woman on the other side of the fence never had even one
friend anywhere in the area. And there were thereafter two separate roads
immediately side-by-side, one on each side of a fence, when a single much
narrower road had sufficed for decades. The troublemaker was the same old
witch who ate my sweet old pet drake; I found his head & feathers on a
hillside where she'd tossed what was left of him. I still wonder if the
Recording Angel ever had an opportunity to jot down even one good deed on
her plaguey page.

An interesting story but it has nothing to do with adverse possession.

Point #1. Assuming you're remembering the details correctly... the
abused property owners argued that the road was a public road. They did
not argue that they in fact OWNED the road by virtue of having used it
in "continuous, open, and notorious" fashion for 20 years (which are the
3 elements which must be satisfied for adverse possession).

Point #2. They lost! The survey said the witch owned half the road,
and the witch got to keep half the road! Proving my point, that it is
not so easy to grab someone's land just because you need it and have
always used it.

This type of situation is handled by easements. Normally the witch
would grant the other owners an easmement to allow them to pave and
drive on the part of the road that is on her property. If the witch
refuses to grant the easement, and the neighbors can prove that they
have no means of access without crossing witch's property, they can go
to court and the witch can be forced to grant the easement. However, in
this case, it sounds like the other neighbors were not landlocked; they
could find a path for the road which crossed only their own property and
not the witch's. So, unfortunately, the burden is on them to move the road.

Of course if the witch was a human being she would have just left the
damn road alone. But the law does not protect one from a**holes, and
the witch was within her legal rights.

- Alex