http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/nyregion/25CONN.html
Drawing a Line, and Defending It
May 25, 2003
By JANE GORDON
ONLY a short while ago, Harry and Lois Kemp's house stood
in Hopkinton, R.I. Then North Stonington, which borders
Hopkinton, remapped its boundaries earlier this year using
global satellite photos and found that the Kemps belonged
to Connecticut.
Now the two towns are skirmishing over the question of
where the state line lies, as the Rhode Island and
Connecticut attorneys general push legislation designed to
stop the dispute. "I'm the only one here who is happy about
this change," said Mr. Kemp, who prefers North Stonington
schools and its local government. "Everybody else is
upset."
Over the course of Connecticut history, citizens have been
shot, stabbed, scalped and doubly taxed over border
disagreements. Novels and nonfiction works have been
written about them. A protracted war was fought. Definitive
boundary surveys were performed using the latest
technology, only to be undone by even later technology.
Nationally, the United States Supreme Court still hears
boundary disputes between states, even as the government
continues to squabble over its maritime borders with
Canada.
The Connecticut-Rhode Island border was disputed all
through the 17th and 18th centuries. Farmers on both sides
of the line brought their scythes to one dispute, cutting
at one another as they might cut their tall grass. Then
they began bringing their firearms, resulting in equally
bloody confrontations.
Now the battle for boundaries is back, as satellite mapping
systems afford even greater accuracy in determining borders
and as towns strapped for cash from state and federal
budget cuts look for ways to pull in a few more dollars.
North Stonington gained about 22 acres, and $15,000 in
taxes from its remapping, said the town's tax assessor,
Joyce Elias. That means 42 pieces of property, including
eight houses that were either partly or completely in Rhode
Island, and that are now in Connecticut.
Of course, that's if North Stonington actually gets to
annex those properties, which means it will have to tread
on the unyielding form of the Hopkinton tax assessor, John
Majeika.
"They are using satellite photos and researching all the
deeds, old deeds that say the boundary lies from the corner
of the oak tree to the corner of the stone walls to the
pile of stones, and the tree has died, the stone wall is
gone and the pile of stones has been moved," Mr. Majeika
said. "Common sense is missing in this case; you're
uprooting people's lives. We think the border should be
where it stands."
Mr. Majeika has made a crusade of uncovering boundary
markers to determine the true line between Connecticut and
Rhode Island, although in some cases, the markers are just
adding to the mystery. One resides right next to a busy
strip of Route 216. It is an unmarked stone tablet, leaning
like the Tower of Pisa in its spot. Then earlier this
month, a resident on Route 216 called Mr. Majeika to report
the discovery of yet another, newer marker, across the
street from the first one. A few days later, Mr. Majeika
stood over his newest discovery, wiping away years of
compacted soil and debris to unearth "CHO Baseline."
"I have no idea what that means," he said, estimating that
the marker is from the 1940's. "Who would put a baseline
marker here, when 100 feet away we have a boundary marker?
I have to figure out where this fits in the puzzle."
A few streets away, two small boundary markers set 60 feet
apart in Collette Angrisani's back yard on Kuehn Road may
illustrate the core of the dispute. Satellite maps depend
on fixed objects on the earth - such as Mrs. Angrisani's
aging boundary markers - to determine land boundaries. This
means, in essence, that the new method still depends on the
old one.
One marker, a 4-foot-high granite tablet, looks to be from
a Connecticut-Rhode Island land survey taken in 1840. That
survey was ratified by the legislatures of both states. The
other, which lies about 60 feet from the 1840's tablet, is
a smaller stone marker. It is stamped with the words "U.S.
Coast & Geodetic Survey and State Survey." That marker, Mr.
Majeika said he believed, is the result of a 1940 survey
done by Connecticut and Rhode Island, but interrupted by
World War II. As a result, the survey was never ratified by
either state's legislature.
Rhode Island has long honored the 1940 survey, which relied
on the latest in surveying technology. Connecticut honors
the 1840 survey, what Ms. Elias called "the last ratified
survey." Therein lies the first problem.
The second issue: Whether accuracy, or history, matters
more. Last year, Killingly remapped its town and annexed
slivers of land from 21 properties in Rhode Island. The
move did not generate much in the way of consternation or
publicity, because no houses were affected. Residents
continued to send their children to neighborhood schools,
continued to vote in Rhode Island. "Nobody's actual address
changed to Killingly," said Melissa Bonin, the Killingly
tax assessor. "Nobody came to live in Connecticut."
Although towns differ on the philosophy of remapping, many
legal opinions rest with history.
"Where you have states or countries that have long marked
the line, built the fence, posted signs, and said 'this is
where we think it is,' it's common sense to just leave it
there," said John Briscoe, a California lawyer who
specializes in international and domestic boundary issues.
"We don't need to encourage people to come up with
innovative ideas for where else to put the line, although,"
he said with a laugh, "it does make for gainful
employment."
Third, and probably of less concern to Connecticut
residents than to Rhode Islanders: Rhode Island, already
the smallest state in the nation, doesn't want to get any
smaller. Hopkinton has even more to lose: Its taxes are
$23.76 for every $1,000 of property owned, competing
against a lower tax rate in North Stonington of $18 for
every $1,000 of property.
Typically, state boundary disputes arrive at the doorstep
of the United States Supreme Court.
"Our legal system is marvelous because it really has
afforded peaceful means for resolving boundary disputes for
more than 200 years," said Mr. Briscoe, who has worked on
border agreements with Alaska, Hawaii, Georgia, California,
and Kuwait after Iraq invaded the country in 1990.
But the attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island
are trying to avoid taking the issue there. Rather, they
have taken it to their respective state legislatures,
suggesting a joint commission to study the matter.
The commission, according to the attorneys' general
proposal, would set boundaries on which the legislatures
would vote. "These boundaries would be set for all time, or
at least until either the legislatures wanted to change
them, or some other unanticipated event might occur,"
Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, said.
"The point is, this process would give finality and
certainty to these boundaries. You know, the result here
has to involve a combination of modern technology, good-old
fashioned Yankee ingenuity and democratic principles."
Neither legislature has acted on the matter.
The dispute
also must involve a meeting of the minds of town officials
in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Which marker is the right
marker?
Those who think boundary disputes are pure foolishness may
take a lesson from a mid-19th century border disagreement
between Connecticut and New York. A half-mile wide
panhandle known as the 'Oblong' extended south from the
Massachusetts border, down the New York-Connecticut
boundary line to Westchester County, then southeast for a
few miles. Both states insisted they owned the property.
The compromise: New York gained access to the Housatonic
River through a pass of the Ten Mile River at Dover, N.Y.
Connecticut acquired an eight-mile wide strip. It grew to
become Connecticut's so-called "Gold Coast" in Fairfield
County one of the most affluent areas of the United States.
At least there a compromise was reached peacefully. A
century earlier, in the years before, during and after the
American Revolution, a little-known but notorious war was
fought between Connecticut settlers, known as Yankees, and
Pennsylvanians, called Pennamites. The war began over a
1662 land grant by King Charles II of England to
Connecticut: a strip of land that ran north to south from
Long Island Sound upward about 70 miles, and east to west
from the Rhode Island border to, incredibly, the Pacific
Ocean. King Charles II, clearly confused about how the
Americas were set up, granted Pennsylvania a charter 19
years later, giving that state the same lands. The
Connecticut grant sat, mostly unused, until an enterprising
real-estate group formed the Susquehanna Company in
Hartford in 1768 and decided to expand westward.
Pennsylvanians did not welcome the Connecticut settlers.
The British and certain tribes of Native Americans combined
to out the settlers, the Native Americans scalping them,
the British blasting them. The war was so long - six years
- so bloody and so overlooked that Christopher Collier, the
Connecticut state historian and professor emeritus of
history at the University of Connecticut, was moved to
write a novel about it, "The Bloody Country," with his
brother, James Lincoln Collier. A trial in 1784 determined
that Pennsylvania owned the land, a determination with
which Mr. Collier does not argue.
"I don't think you can undo history," he said. "I think we
ought to just allow the boundaries to stand. There's a
legal concept called adverse possession, that holds if
you've been using some land for 15 years or so and nobody
has contested your use of that land and you think you own
it, then you can claim it."
He wished the attorneys general luck in pursuing the issue
through the state legislatures.
"This is a case for the federal courts," he said. "This
does not seem to me to be an issue that either the General
Assembly or the Rhode Island legislature can resolve."