ERROR to the Circuit Court for the District of Maryland.
Eliza Deery brought ejectment October 12, 1863, in the court just mentioned, to recover from one Cray an undivided fifth part of the southern half of Kent Fort Manor, an
ancient manor in Kent County, Maryland. This manor was an irregularly shaped piece of land, whose longest direction is mainly north and south, surrounded entirely by water except on the northern line, which crosses a rather narrow neck of land. The diagram illustrates roughly, and without various indentations from the waters which run up into the body of the manor, its outline forms and will make obvious the fact-a fact necessarily belonging to the division of a piece of land thus shaped-that, if the manor were divided into two nearly equal parts by a line running from the western water-boundary to the eastern, all of the southern half would be surrounded by water, except the short line separating it on the north from the other half.
The plaintiff having established on the trial a title to the whole of the manor in Samuel Lloyd Chew, one of the ancestors, further traced the title by descent to Lowman Chew, who died in 1862 childless and intestate, leaving five heirs of whom she is one. The defendants, on the other hand, introduced conveyances from Samuel A. Chew, the father of Lowman Chew, for a large part of the northern half of the manor, and, it was conceded that the plaintiff had no controversy with the tenant in possession of the remainder of the northern half not conveyed by Samuel A. Chew.
The controversy was thus limited to the southern half, of which, as already said, the plaintiff claimed an undivided fifth part, and to which she had shown a prim a facie title.
To defeat this the defendants introduced a deed dated October 22d, 1787, from the said Samuel Lloyd Chew (from whom the plaintiff derived title) to his mother, Elizabeth Chew, which was asserted to be a conveyance of the fee of this south half of the manor.
The description of this land in this deed was in these words:
'All that moiety or half part of a tract of land called Kent Fort Manor, lying and being in Kent Island, in Queen Anne's County, being all that part of said tract of land which lies to the south westward of a line beginning on Northwest Creek and running an easterly course, agreeable to the plat of said land made by William Brown, of Anne Arundel County, in such manner as to comprehend one-half of the number of acres of the whole tract, the said line to be run and ascertained under the direction of John Thomas, Esquire, of Anne Arundel County.'The plaintiff-objecting to this deed that the description of the land conveyed by it was so uncertain, as to render the deed void-excepted to the introduction of it, unless the plat which the deed referred to as made by Brown was produced and its lines shown. The court, however, permitted the deed to be read, subject to the right of the plaintiff to exclude the same hereafter, if upon the closing of the testimony it should not have been legally and sufficiently applied by the defendants to the maintenance of the issue on their part.
The defendant then, in order to apply it, or in other words, show that this northern line had an existence, so as to enable one to determine what was the south half of the manor, introduced certain evidence, as follows:
A map of the Kent Fort Manor, which was admitted to be part of a record of a chancery suit in Maryland, filed in 1802, and the location on the said map of Susanna Tait's moiety, admitted to be a correct location of the share of said manor assigned in said court to Susanna Tait, as sister, and one of the heirs of Arthur Bryan, in the partition of his real estate. This map had figures and lines on it showing a division of the manor into two equal parts of 1002 1/2 acres each, and that the division was made by a straight line from a point on Northwest Creek, projecting far into the body of the tract, in a course a little south of east, to the eastern shore of the island.
Deeds showing conveyances of Elizabeth Chew (grantee in the deed whose admission in evidence we have already stated was objected to) to one T. M. Foreman, from Foreman to Philip Barton Key, and from Key to Arthur Bryan, of the same land, describing it either as the land on the said manor, purchased by Elizabeth Chew of her son Samuel, or as Elizabeth Chew's half part of the manor.