Missing links
New law driving towns to unearth old roads
Toolbox
By Kevin O'Connor Staff Writer - Published: March 18, 2007
Vermont municipalities have enough trouble maintaining today's roads, many drivers will tell you. So why are the state's 251 cities and towns seeking volunteers to unearth forgotten ones?
Credit or blame Act 178. Adopted by the state Legislature last year, it requires communities to identify and add unused, unnoticed yet legally established "ancient roads" to their current highway records by July 2009 or lose rights to them by 2015.
Vermonters have mapped roads for legal purposes even before statehood in 1791. Some trails, built for long-gone homes and farms, appear to be fading scars on the landscape. But they can live on in records decades or centuries old, much to the surprise and chagrin of landowners, real estate agents, lawyers, lenders and insurers.
To buy property, one typically hires an attorney to search the history of a deed or title. The state requires a lawyer to look back 40 years. But that search doesn't guarantee discovery of all ancient roads and rights of way that may be recorded only in older documents and memories.
Title insurance companies have run up legal bills of $100,000 or more settling disputes between local officials and landowners in such towns as Barnard, Bethel and Chittenden.
What to do? The Legislature adopted Act 178 last spring. It requires communities to research and map all of its roads. Any legally established path that's not on a local highway map as of July 1, 2009, and "not otherwise clearly observable by physical evidence of its use" will be deemed an "unidentified corridor" that communities won't be responsible for — nor have rights to.
Municipalities have used this month's town meetings and annual reports to tell residents about citizen committees to research old roads. It's not just a matter of egalitarianism, but also economics.
Act 178 was passed with a grant program to help towns fund research and mapping. But the state Department of Housing and Community Affairs has paid out the appropriated $100,000 to help 22 towns, leaving 46 other interested municipalities empty-handed. The Legislature currently is considering adding $200,000 more in grants. But with too many towns and too little money, many communities are seeking volunteers.
"It is not a job for the weak of heart," Montpelier lawyer and historian Paul Gillies writes in "How to Find Ancient Roads," a guide of the nonprofit Vermont Institute for Government. "You are about to undertake a puzzle as challenging as Sudoku, as satisfying as a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and as frustrating as raising orchids in winter."
Researchers must rummage not only on foot, but also in local records dating back centuries and state Agency of Transportation maps that began in 1931.
"It can be such a big task," confirms Trevor Lashua, a legislative associate and Act 178 specialist with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. He tells towns to tap local historians, surveyors and real estate agents after answering a few questions:
"Does your community want to retain every road ever established? Do you want to get rid of any roads that you currently do not know are out there? Does your community fall somewhere in between? Is there a region of town in which you may look for potential ancient roads/unidentified corridors due to future development considerations?"
Paul Hannan, a Calais surveyor and selectman, also recommends recruiting some "37th generation Vermonters" with good memories.
As Gillies writes in his guide: "Knowing the location of old roads will avoid surprises and expensive lawsuits that plague many towns. It may form the basis of a town's systematic reclassifying, discontinuing, or using these rights-of-way. It will clarify land titles, avoid trauma at closings, assist planners in deciding how the town should grow, and, for existing roads, provide important information to the select board and road crew on precisely what the town owns, including the width of the public right-of-way."
Such work not only preserves the past, but also can protect the future, Vermont State Archivist Gregory Sanford adds. He has spoken to lawmakers about the need to retain all types of important information.
"If over the course of 200 years we have so mismanaged our public records we can't identify rights of way, what is the management plan for making sure people understand where we put nuclear waste over thousands and tens of thousands of years? From the perspective of an archivist, it raises some larger concerns about how we manage all records and preserve vital information across the years."
Contact Kevin O'Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.
BOX
Ancient roads on the information superhighway
Vermonters wanting to know more about Act 178 can sign up for a new listserv created by the Vermont Department of Housing and Community Affairs and the University of Vermont Center for Rural Studies. Users can ask questions, offer tips and share stories free of charge by sending e-mail to ancientroads@list.uvm.edu
Also, the Vermont Institute for Government offers the guide "How to Find Ancient Roads" by Montpelier lawyer and historian Paul Gillies at the address http://crs.uvm.edu/citizens/ancientroads.pdf.
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