Blaylock v. Holland
Dallas Court of Appeals, No. 05-12-00732-CV (March 6, 2013)
Justices FitzGerald, Fillmore, and Richter (by assignment) (Opinion)
In this boundary dispute between two neighboring families, the court reversed the trial court’s judgment awarding title by adverse possession to a three-foot strip of land running between the two families’ back yards, and rendered judgment confirming title in the record holders.
A wooden fence at the rear of Plaintiffs’ yard stood three feet inside their actual property line. For several years, Defendants treated that three-foot swath as if it belonged to them, caring for it and using it for family activities. They eventually erected a chain-link fence against the existing wooden fence, enclosing the disputed strip of land. Plaintiffs asked Defendants to remove the new fence, but Defendants refused because they “mistakenly thought” all the land on their side of the old, wooden fence was theirs. Just short of the ten-year anniversary of Defendants’ installation of the chain-link fence, Plaintiffs filed suit to quiet title; Defendants counterclaimed, asserting adverse possession, relying not only on their erection of the new fence, but also on their daily use of and care for the disputed tract for several years before that. The court of appeals, however, rejected Defendants’ claim, finding that, before the chain-link fence was erected, “there was nothing about [Defendants’] actions with respect to the strip in question that was necessarily inconsistent or adverse to the [Plaintiffs’] ownership.” “Mowing the grass, planting flowers, and maintaining a hedge,” said the court, “are not sufficient hostile acts to give notice of an exclusive possession.” And because Plaintiffs had brought suit to quiet title less than ten years after Defendants erected the chain-link fence, Defendants had not met their burden of proving ten full years of continuous, open, and hostile possession. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§16.021(1) & 16.026.
