Tag Archives: land

Exciting news about a road

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Today’s Southbridge Evening News (4.9MB PDF) reports that Southbridge is once again thinking of building an access road to the Southbridge Airport and surrounding industrial park from Route 20. This road would go through the back of the land, and would be a wonderful benefit for Charlton, Southbridge, and us. (The value of land goes up dramatically when people can, you know, get to it.) We are one of the landowners who was approached and wrote a letter saying that we would be interested in such a road.

Of course, discussions of the road have cropped up from time to time for the past tens of years, and it will probably be at least 5–10 years at the earliest before this could be completed. But it’s still exciting news.

How quickly spam comes…

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On Wednesday, June 27, land got transferred into our name. However, despite the deed clearly naming us “Peter S. Cooper, Jr.” and “Jessica Jane Cooper”, the registry of deeds indexed us under “Peter S. Cooper” and “Jessica Jane”, omitting the final part of each of our names. I don’t think that this is really a big deal, since it’s just the indexing to find us and not the legal name of ownership (as far as my understanding goes).

Two days later, on Friday, June 29, at my parent’s house (next door), arrives a letter from Pioneer Oil, addressed to “Jessica Jane” and “Peter Cooper”, labeled with “Welcome to your new home”. As far as I can tell, they must get a data feed of new land transfers and try to market to them, assuming that land transfers must mean a new house, or something like that. We received similar postal spam when getting the land that our house is on. The fact that it went next door is somewhat interesting, but that was probably the only address listed on the deed. I also found it interesting that the names on it were hand-written and that it was metered with full $0.41 first-class postage. (I of course, wrote “Refused” on it and put it back.)

So, I’ve put in my parent’s mailbox today a temporary change of address form, for 6 months, for “Jessica Jane”, to go from 190 Berry Corner Rd. (my parents’ house) to 194 Berry Corner Rd. (our house). Since it’s temporary, we won’t get the slew of mailings from people the post office sends permanent address changes to. Since it’s a change of address, Standard Mail being sent to “Jessica Jane” at 190 will be discarded instead of forwarded. And if first-class mail gets sent to “Jessica Jane” at 190, it will be forwarded to us at 194, but we can refuse it and it will actually get sent back to the sender. (After all, there’s nobody here with last name “Jane”.)

How tough can it be to buy land?

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So, about a month or two ago now, we decided to buy a bunch of my parents’ land from them. This should be about as simple a process as a land transfer could be, since we have an agreed-upon price, and we’re not planning on building on the land. However, we’ve had issues with one thing after another, as the plans have gone to the Planning Board, who required some corrections from the surveyor, who did so and sent it back to the Planning Board, who approved the plans but didn’t have enough people there to sign it somehow, and then it eventually got signed and sent to the lawyer, who tried to take it to the Registry of Deeds but couldn’t record it since somehow they don’t have an updated signature list of the people on the Planning Board since the elections that were at the start of May.

So, we’re hoping that it will actually get recorded this week, but that’s that we’ve been thinking for the past several weeks, too.

In the meantime, there have been at least 3 other land transfers that we know of that have happened since the May elections (which only changed one person on the board), all of which got recorded with no problem. It looks like part of the problem is that my mom (who is on the Planning Board) of course didn’t sign our land transfer (conflict of interest and all that, quite reasonably), and so since she did sign the other ones there wasn’t a problem somehow.

So, it appears that my mom’s signature is required for anything to happen in the Town of Charlton.

We’ve got land!

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On a whim, I headed over to the Worcester Registry of Deeds site today and searched to see if the land transfer from my parents had become official. Amazingly enough, it had, as of yesterday. I downloaded the Official Registered Plans marking the lot as well as the Official Deed saying that the land has become ours. It’s kinda neat—Jessi and I are landowners now.

Rather than put you though needing to use their horrible searching interface, I put the Official Images up on my computer for people who are interested (and so I have a copy). Warning: they’re in TIFF format.