Regarding Ship's Knee

There are two important documents online that inform this discussion.

The Plat Map

The first is the plat map from 1959 available here

Here is a zoom I made of the important part of this map showing lot 16 (where I live) and the surrounding lots. I encourage you to follow the link above too, to get the original document.

ARCGIS Map

The other is the Charles County argis map

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/320f3c8649f74bc89a84df8d5c41d175/page/Map-Page/

You'll have to scroll/zoom the map yourself.  We are in the northern "peak" of Charles County on the map.

Here is a zoomed image I made of the map


 

Explanation

When we (the Fishmans) bought our property, it was the first time we ever bought a property that required that we travel over easements to get to a public road.  ALL the "roads" in the Moyaone in Charles County, even Old Landing and Steamboat are privately owned.  You can see this on the arcgis tax map.  To get to my house you have to travel over an easement on Lot 0 (Goetzmer), Lot 15.  Once you get to the bottom of the hill you are land owned by the Moyaone which has an easement.  You travel that to Ship's Knee and then go up the easement on lot 13 until Ship's Knee becomes our driveway.

Because of the potential for problems there, before buying we paid our title insurance company do an extra search to make sure both that all the required easements for us to reach a public road were in place, and to ensure there were no easements on our property.

We specifically valued our property highly because of the privacy.  Had we discovered in our research that the road on our property was on an easement, we would not have bought that land.

Anyone who bought a property in our area and did any research would have discovered 2 things.  There is a road, but no easement on lot 16, and an easement, but no road on lots 18 and 19.  There is no legal record of there ever having been an easement on lot 16, regardless of anecdotal stories of how people travelled the road. Exhaustive research by several legal teams has proven there was never an easement granted nor sufficient reason to grant an easement.  Lots 17, 18 and 19 are NOT landlocked because there is a SPECIFIC easements for them to travel on to reach public roads.  Pursuant to NPS oversight, deed restrictions and county and state requirements, someone could build/develop lots 17, 18 and 19, including putting in roads.

There is no amount of legal research that would have revealed to a property buyer that anyone other than the owners of lot 16 could travel on Ship's Knee past the second bend. There are only 2 documents that matter, and I have linked to them above and they are crystal clear.

I'm happy to discuss this in person with anyone, though I'd request we meet individually rather than the way things went last time with a bunch of angry people yelling at me.  Feel free to email me at

fxshdzn@gmzxl.com  But replace each x with an i and each z with an a

Put "neighbor" in the subject, and I'll get right back to you!

Dan!