Land

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.

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).

The land transfer finally got recorded today. We now officially own 46½ more acres, bringing our total ownership to approximately 48 acres.

Plan is in book 858, page 25
Deed is in book 41390, page 194

(You can look them up at the Registry of Deeds under Southern Worcester County, but their application is too dumb to let me link to the documents directly.)

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.

“Approvals-Not-Required: … • Cooper-Berry Corner Road” — Charlton Planning Board Agenda for June 6, 2007.

Hopefully, by the end of the week we’ll be the proud owners of 46½ more acres of property.

We received our first property tax bill from the Town of Charlton.

Ah, the joys of being a landowner.

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.

Received good news this morning!

Dear Pete and Jessi,
The planning board signed the plans for creating your lot. One step closer!
Love,
Mom