He built the dock in the summer of 1958, board by board, weekend by weekend, before he even owned the land outright. He knew he was going to buy it. He just started building. But the dock wasn’t my grandfather’s smartest move. His smartest move was what he did at that recorder’s office before he left. He filed a shoreline easement, a recorded right-of-way and access clause negotiated personally that ensured no upstream or adjacent property owner could ever obstruct, alter, or commercialize the natural drainage corridor feeding the cove. Two pages, handwritten addendum, witnessed and notorized.
He did it because three years earlier, a neighbor upstream had attempted to damn the creek that fed the property. Not out of malice, just out of carelessness. And Henry had to fight him off with nothing but a strong voice and a good attorney.
He won that fight, but he decided he would never need to fight it again. So, he put it in writing. He put it in the county record. And then he went home and never mentioned it to anyone except his son. Here’s what most people don’t know about easements like that one. And this matters, so stay with me.
Reparian easements, which are property rights tied specifically to land adjacent to a body of water, are among the oldest and most legally durable protections in American property law. Unlike a zoning variance, which a city council can overturn, unlike an HOA bylaw, which a board can rewrite on a Tuesday night with four people in the room, a recorded easement runs with the land itself. It attaches to the deed.
It survives ownership transfers, HOA reorganizations, municipal reszoning, and the passage of time. A properly recorded easement does not expire through non-use. It does not fade because nobody enforced it for a decade. It does not disappear because the person who filed it has been dead for 30 years. It just sits there in the county record, quiet and permanent, waiting for the moment someone needs it.
My grandfather filed that easement in 1962. My father inherited the land in 1991 when Henry passed, maintained it quietly, paid his HOA dues to the small 8 family association that existed then, and never had reason to think about the easement at all. The HOA in those years was barely worth mentioning. Road grading, a shared boat ramp, $45 a month.
Nobody was building anything. Nobody was taking anything. The land just sat there and the easement sat with it. For the first 20some years my father owned that land. The HOA was the kind of organization you forgot existed between meetings. $45 a month that covered road grading twice a year and maintenance on the shared boat ramp at the north end of the cove.
Eight families. Everyone knew everyone. My father served one term on the board in the mid ’90s, mostly because nobody else wanted to do it. He said the most controversial thing they ever voted on was whether to repaint the ramp sign. They voted yes. That was the HOA. Then in 2014, Gerald stepped down. Gerald was a retired school teacher who had run the association for 11 years with the energy of a man who genuinely just wanted the road graded and the ramp functional.
When he announced he was stepping back, a woman named Diane Harwick put her name forward. Nobody ran against her. Nobody took her seriously enough to bother. Diane was mid-50s, always in tailored resort wear, even on a Tuesday morning, drove a white Range Rover that would eventually have a Crestwood HOA parking placard in the windshield, a placard for a community that did not yet exist.
She spoke in the soft, measured tone of someone who had been told no many times over many years and had quietly decided that no was simply a starting position. She called herself a community advocate. Her LinkedIn still listed her as a real estate developer. Year 1 under Diane dues tripled $135 a month.
