The foreman told me the survey pin at the fence line didn’t match the plan he’d been given. He had stopped the crew because three of the trees were already down, but the remaining orchard appeared to sit on a different parcel entirely. I asked him who had given him the plan, and he showed me a copy with my son’s name on the work order. The problem was that the boundaries on his plan had been moved almost thirty feet toward my house. I looked at the fallen trees and realized they had cut down part of the orchard that was unquestionably mine. The foreman said he could prove exactly where the original boundary had been.
I called the county survey office, and they sent someone out that afternoon. He found the original iron markers buried beneath decades of soil and confirmed that my son’s contractor had been working from an outdated parcel map. The three trees they had removed were on my land, while the pool site my son wanted was actually on a separate strip that belonged to the county’s conservation easement. I asked how the contractor had received the incorrect map, and the surveyor said it had been submitted with the permit application. My son’s signature was on the application. He had knowingly submitted a boundary plan that made the orchard appear to be part of his property.
The county immediately suspended the permit, and my attorney sent my son a demand for the value of the destroyed trees and the cost of restoring the damaged ground. He finally admitted he had moved the boundary on paper because the actual property line left too little room for the pool. I told him that wasn’t an accident—it was a decision. He offered to pay for the three trees if I would let him keep the rest of the project, but I refused. The orchard survived, although I still miss those three trees every spring. My son thought he could move a line on a piece of paper and take thirty years of my work with it—but the ground remembered exactly where the boundary was.
