Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 276, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1911 — State Hopes to Save Land From Grabbers. [ARTICLE]

State Hopes to Save Land From Grabbers.

Governor Marshall, W. H. O’Brien, auditor. i of state and Thomas M. Hodan, attorney-general, are preparing to make a final fight in the courts to clarify, for the state, if possible, its title to lands in the north part of the statd reclaimed for cultivation by the recession of the Kankakee river. Quotation from authorities in law are being prepared to use in the court fight, and the state expects to make a determined stand to hold the land, which is now being sought by land grabbers and corporations capitalized for hundreds of thousands of dollars, represented in a large measure by Chicago capital. The extent of the land involved is estimated at more than one hundred thousand acres/said to be worth from >500,000 to >1,000,000. If the state can establish its title to the land and can sell it, the proceeds, under the law, will go to the state school fund.

A peculiar condition of facts will be presented by the state, and by which presentation the state expects to modify various court findings in the state and United States courts, which are based on the ancient law concerning riparian rights, or the rights of land owners whose land runs down to streams or lakes. Under the riparian rights latv, when the stream or lake recedes from the boundary line established by public surveyors, the rights of the owner of the adjacent land extend to the new bank of the receding water. The difficulty encountered by the state lies in the fact that when the United States surveyors surveyed the Kankakee river, they ran the boundary line along the edge of the swamps bordering the river, and in their reports and in their maps designated all that part between the established lines on either side as the Kankakee river. In some places the boundary lines are two miles from the actual stream bed. When surveyed, the area between the actual stream bed and the boundary lines was swamp land.

Late in the eighties the state appropriated >IOO,OOO to aid in dis< .dging rocks in Illinois, which held, ba ;k the water in the stream. As a resu 1 : of this move the water flow was made more rapid, and the swamps alongside the stream bed were drained, becoming tillable and forming rich farai land. It was then that the owners of land along the edges of the former swamp began to extend their fenc-s and claim all the land to the strea n bed. This extension was made under the old theory that the land was secured to the adjacent landowners by riparian rights. The state contends that the original swamp land was not a stream or a lake within the mean l !? of the law, and that persons who have seized it have no right to it. It will be argued in court that riparian do not apply to such a condition as that along the Kankakee. Judge Verpillat, of the Starke circuit court, a year ago, in a suit ‘nvolving certain lands siezed by a corporation under riparian rights theory, upheld the contention of the corporation as against the state. An appeal has been filed in the supreme coart, and it is this case for which the st-.<e is making preparations.