By Larry Dablemont
Globe guest columnist
A sleek looking buck jumped up from a brush pile where he was resting, and white-flagged it through the timber away from us.
He was on land owned by Deanna and Dacey Hewett, but there are posts across it with Missouri Department of Conservation’s yellow signs designating it to be its property. It seems it intends to take it, and take land of two other private owners, which are neighbors. Without notifying any of those landowners, MDC surveyors cut swaths across their lands, set up stakes and signs along the boundaries of its new survey. Letters were sent to the landowners after the survey was completed.
The department intends to take about 10 to 15 acres of the Hewetts’ land, and about seven acres of Robert Drake’s land. I visited the area and measured the amount of land taken myself.
The new stake line encroaches about 175 feet onto the land of Roy and Audrey Smith, where a number of small trees were cut so that the new stakes could be planted. The Smiths didn’t find out about the encroachment on their land until a relative who was hunting there notified them.
The Smiths say the MDC notified them they intend to remove all fences belonging to the three property owners, which have stood and been maintained as property lines since 1938.
Here’s the story behind it:
Ten years ago, the MDC was given 200 acres of beautiful Ozark timberland about 15 miles southeast of Mountain Grove by a man named Richard Massengill, who was dying of cancer. Hewitt and the Smiths say that Massengill loved the land and gave it to the Department of Conservation after it promised it would leave it as it was.
It promised, all right, and then just after Massengill died, it bulldozed a road right through it. If the road was built to evaluate timber stands, it may be that timber contracts will follow at some point in time, as has been the case in recent years on a number of state wildlife areas. If that happens, the department will make thousands out of Massengill’s gift. It will, in time, look like a tornado ripped through it and every big tree worth a few dollars will be gone, stumps and brush piles left in its place.
The MDC survey involved getting on all these folks land in secret, they notified no one. They cut through that land with machinery, set stakes, drove metal posts so deep they cannot be removed. It was followed by a delegation of MDC officials out of both West Plains and Jefferson City, telling the landowners that they could no longer use any of the land on the other side of the stakes for any purpose. They were told the MDC was going to tear down the existing fences, build new ones and charge them half the cost of the whole process.
It could work just fine if these small landowners, Ozark people who do not have a great deal of money, just agreed. They didn’t, and they are going to try to go to court to reclaim their land, on the basis they and their ancestors have maintained those fences as true boundaries since 1938, when the original survey was done. Unlike the MDC, they paid for their land.
It would be nice if this case could be heard by a jury made up of other Ozark landowners. As it is, a judge will likely decide it. But even so, the “adverse possession” law prevents private landowners from rearranging survey lines when fences have been in place so long. It remains to be seen whether the Missouri Department of Conservation is subject to the same laws as private landowners. The Smiths, the Hewetts and the Drakes will have to spend what will amount to several thousand dollars to keep land which they have paid for, maintained and owned for many years. All these folks were born and raised in the area.
The Smiths and Deanna Hewett remember Richard Massengill, and they say he would roll over in his grave if he knew what was happening. He left his wife Jean a home and 75 acres next to the 200 he left the MDC.
Another landowner on another side of the Massengill tract lives out of state and may not know anything at all about the new survey. It is likely that the MDC now has a large chunk of his land staked out as well. I called Assistant Director Tim Ripperger in the main office of the MDC at Jefferson City in October, and he said he knew nothing about this. He recently called me and said the survey was all in order and the land belonged to the MDC within its new survey until a court decides differently.
If anyone doubts this account, they can go see it all for themselves. The Massengill tract is now the Massengill Conservation Area, and it is well marked off of Highway W, which runs east off of Highway 95, 12 miles south of Mountain Grove.
Larry Dablemont writes a regular outdoors column, which can be found each Sunday in the Globe’s sports section.
