Issues → March/April 2009 → Travel →

Maps Don't Show Vermont's Sleeping Roads

Right of way v. private property

by Steve Kemper

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What happens when sleeping roads wake up? Do they become beauties or nightmares? Vermont is about to find out.

Until recently, the state's sleeping roads had been hibernating in a dormant law that says that any road ever established by a town remains a town road unless it has been officially discontinued. That sounds innocuous, but beneath every town's network of streets lies a spidery palimpsest of abandoned lanes that once connected farms or districts, but faded into the landscape and vanished from maps long ago. More pertinently, they vanished from property deeds. Yet according to the law, many of these forgotten roads -- also called "ghost roads," "phantom roads," "invisible roads," and "ancient roads" -- are merely sleeping and can be resurrected by town decree even if they lie on private property.

When rubbed against present-day Vermont, this law became a friction stick. Many of the state's growing population of retirees, second-home owners, and new professionals had posted their property, which didn't sit well with Vermonters who had always been able to hunt that upland or snowmobile that meadow or hike that old path through the woods.

So a few towns began using the old law to claim ancient rights-of-way on private property, with predictable results: shock, anger, lawsuits. Title searches in Vermont typically go back 40 years, not 200, so titles that had seemed clean were suddenly cloudy, casting a pall over the state's lucrative real estate market. In 2004, Vermont's largest title insurance company threatened to stop writing policies in three towns where officials were pressing claims about sleeping roads. In the most notorious example, Chittenden denied a family's application for a housing addition, asserting that an invisible old road ran through the home and remained a right-of-way, even though it hadn't been used or maintained for 170 years.

Hoping to calm and clarify things, the Vermont legislature has given towns until February 10, 2010, to identify claimable sleeping roads and add them to official town highway maps. After that, any unmapped roads will be classified as "unidentified corridors," and on July 1, 2015, towns will forfeit their rights to them. It's a last chance for towns to find and recover old routes that might someday benefit recreation, conservation, or development. That's why town officials and volunteers all over Vermont are now blowing dust from leather-bound volumes labeled "Road Surveys" and "Deeds," and trying to decipher ornate penmanship from 150 or 200 years ago.

In the town of Huntington, these volunteers call themselves the Ancient Roads Committee. Its 10 members include several retirees, a forester, a GIS (geographic information systems) analyst, a contractor/ski patroller, and a biologist for the Audubon Society. They've lived in town for anywhere from five years to a lifetime and were drawn to the project by their love of history and of Huntington. "I don't think any of us gives two hoots about title companies," says Aaron Worthley, the GIS analyst. "For us it's about old maps, history, and a way to better understand the town."

Some towns are researching only a few lost lanes, but the Huntington group decided to track down every road in their town's history. In the Huntington vault, where the original charter signed by King George III in 1763 leans, framed, against a wall, they found several volumes of old road surveys. The earliest covered 1791 to 1795.