Rock mining, rock robbing and rock quarrying on the claim that retained “mineral rights” trumps surface rights under old land deeds has destroyed much surface land on the Cumberland Plateau in recent decades, and the blight is rapidly worsening. It also has sparked bitter conflicts with land owners whose deeds give them the “surface rights” to their properties.
Indeed, stripmining for surface rock on the claimed strength of retained mineral rights over logical surface rights has become a virtual plague of ecological despoliation across one the state’s most treasured natural regions. A ruling issued in Chancery Court here Monday may well help land owners, whose deeds convey only surface rights, protect the integrity of their deeds and land against this plague.
The ruling, issued by Chancellor Howell Peoples, explores both the specific conflicts inherent in the case at issue, and the general body of law on the matter, including Tennessee Supreme Court opinions and a more recent and broadly applicable Tennessee Court of Appeals ruling. At its core, Chancellor Peoples makes what could become a pivotal and influential ruling that may be used to dampen the conflicts, and land damage, inherent in abuse of surface rights by rock miners.
The case in his court, heard last fall, involved a lawsuit filed six years ago by George Avery Land and Faye Land against five people who obtained parcels of land from the couple and later sought to bar the Lands’ plans to intensively stripmine stone from the land wherever it was found.
The owners protested that if the Lands’ rock mining was carried out, it would involve bulldozers and earth moving equipment and would substantially disrupt the surface of the land, destroy native trees and vegetation, and reshape the contours of their property. What would be left of their surface rights, one property owner asked: “The air above it?”
That is an apt question given widely reported instances of gross abuse of surface rights to take mountain stone elsewhere on the plateau. In many cases — including one in which an owner of mineral rights wrecked the surface land along a portion of the state-owned Cumberland Trail — the state might have pleaded for a ruling based on Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” In that famous play, a moneylender who sought to claim the “pound of flesh” his contract with a borrower awarded him was judged to have the right to take the flesh, but not one drop of blood.
In fact, surface stone would appear virtually inseparable from the surface. Yet on the Cumberland Plateau, owners of deeds with mineral rights — though such rights traditionally referred to minerals, ores and metals taken in underground mining — have broadly and controversially applied “mineral” status to stones on the ground. They have subsequently mined as deep as 10 feet, or more, as long as they could find mountain stone in the earth. Such surface as is left after such surface strip mining for stone in no way resembles the surface of the land bought by the deed holders of surface rights. And courts have yet to rule definitely whether surface mountain stone may even be appropriately claimed as a “mineral.”
In the current Chancery Court case, however, Judge Peoples cited Supreme Court and appellate rulings to formulate a ruling that deeds to mineral rights may not be interpreted to mean the destruction of the surface to which its owners are reasonably entitled unless the deed conveyed for surface rights spells out specific reservations for rock quarrying rights or other specific methods for extracting surface stone.
In the case brought by the Lands, he found that the circumstances of their original deed had seemed to grant them the right to harvest surface stone by “hand tools,” such as a mattock and shovel, the use of a one-ton pickup truck to haul the stones away, and the right to clear a road to the area from which they could load the stones they gather by hand.
That’s more liberal conveyance of mineral rights that we might have hoped, and it doesn’t attempt to define “mineral rights.” But it’s a far cry from the mechanized earth moving now being used across the plateau and in parts of Waldens Ridge to strip mine mountain stone from the surface of the land, and well below it, at the expense of owners of surface rights. These aggrieved owners should make good use of the legal precedent in Chancellor Peoples’ ruling.