It turns out that there are some places that the town clerk didn’t search before, and in 1955, Charlton Town Meeting discontinued Berry Corner Rd., from Ayers Rd. to the Sturbridge town line, from being a town road. Had we discovered this much earlier in the process, this all would have been much more difficult. However, finding it now, they can’t retroactively revoke our right to build, and it’ll be easier to get telephone poles put in because they’ll just need permission from us, and not from the town. So I guess things are going alright with it, it’s just… odd.
In other news, I ran my first qualifier for the North American Challenge at Card Stop in Dudley. We had 11 people, which is the most we’ve ever had for a tournament there. A very talented player who drove in from Boston ended up winning. Jessi came in 3rd.
Wow. How very convinient… just wait until the Charlton conspiracy theoriest hear about this :-)
Well, it has both pluses and minuses. But it’s really just more due to government incompetence than any sort of conspiracy.
My mother had a similar problem a few years ago. She wanted to build a house on a lot in some unpopulated area of Massachusetts (Royalston, I think), but the town road servicing the property officially ended a few hundred feet before the lot she wanted to build on so it officially had no road access. She would have had trouble getting a building permit, didn’t want to fight it, and gave up.
I think the problem was there used to be a farmhouse at the end of the road with a driveway, and that driveway eventually became de facto part of the road. The official records were never updated to reflect this. The town road maintenance people thought the road ended where it seemed to, but the powers that be didn’t want to update their records to reflect reality. (If this story sounds incoherent, it’s because I don’t remember it very well.)
Anyway, you aren’t alone in having issues because of towns that don’t have a consistent picture of where their roads are.