Co-author Taylor Hall

In Alcott v. 1893 Oil and Gas, Ltd., a Texas court of appeals applied the scourge of inaccurate, incomplete or careless (sometimes all three!) deed drafting – the statute of frauds – to reject a claim to ownership of minerals.

The facts

In 1917, the owner of 2,092-acres in Live Oak County conveyed the surface of the tract and 3/4ths of the minerals to a developer, who then sold portions to different buyers. Ultimately, one Robert Alcott acquired “Acre 8 in Tract 69” along with an “undivided interest in an undivided one half of any oil, gas or other minerals that may be found to be in, under or upon any part of” the 2092 acres. The seller did not have title to minerals under the entire 2092 arces. Mr. Alcott’s heirs filed a trespass to try title suit (and the claims that usualy accompany a TTT action) to recover “all of the interests conveyed by the Alcott Deed”.

The problem? The seller did not own the entire 2092 acres. The Alcott Deed contained no language limiting the conveyance to minerals under land actually owned by the seller. Nonetheless, the Alcott asserted that the deed vested them with mineral interests across portions of the larger tract.

Statute of frauds

To comply with the statute of frauds an instrument conveying real proprty must provide sufficient information to reasonably identify the property in question, either directly or by reference to some other existing writing by which the property to be conveyed may be identified with ‘reasonable certainty. Also, the property description must furnish enough information to locate the property’s general area as in identifying it by tract survey and county, and to determine the size, shape, and boundaries of the property.

The court found the Alcott Deed’s property description was deficient. It lacked any qualifying language limiting the grant to minerals under land owned by the seller, and nothing within the four corners of the instrument supplied data sufficient to locate the property’s size, shape, and boundaries. The Alcott heirs relied on plats prepared in 1913 and 1920 to bolster their claim, but those documents did not provide enough information to identify the general area where the claimed mineral interests would lie.

Concluding that the Alcott Deed violated the statute of frauds, the Court declined the Alcott heirs’ claim. There were alternative claims and defenses and that the Court did not need to reach once it ruled on the statute of frauds.

As a practical matter, it probably didn’t help the plaintiffs that the deed in question was more than a century ago and defendants provided evidence that they had been leasing, drilling wells and mining on the land since the 1940’s.

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