Background
Peggy Alston owns five parcels of land in Franklin County, North Carolina, but lives in Alabama. The only way to reach her property is by traveling Roy Tharrington Road to its end and then continuing onto a pathway that crosses the adjacent Jacox Property. Alston and her late husband had used that pathway since at least the 1950s—before she was married. Over the decades, her hired forester conducted annual inspections via the pathway, logging trucks periodically hauled timber across it, and the Community Gun Club (to which Alston leased hunting rights) regularly maintained it by grading, rocking, ditching, and clearing limbs.
In 2018, Lloyd Jacox purchased the adjoining property from the Tharrington family. In 2016, before that sale, a Tharrington family representative had given the Community Gun Club permission to access and hunt on what was still the Tharrington property—permission that expired in 2018. After Jacox moved onto the property in 2023, he began locking his gate and placing logs and ropes across the pathway to block access. Alston filed suit seeking a prescriptive or implied easement. Following a bench trial in Franklin County Superior Court, Judge Rhinehart found Alston entitled to a prescriptive easement. Jacox appealed on three grounds: the evidence failed to establish every element as a matter of law, the order inadequately described the easement’s location, and the width and scope were insufficiently established.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals affirmed on all three grounds. On the elements of a prescriptive easement—adverse or hostile use, open and notorious use, continuous use for at least twenty years, and substantial identity of the easement—the court found the unchallenged findings of fact (which are binding on appeal) more than adequate. Critically, the court reaffirmed that the required twenty-year period does not have to be the twenty years immediately preceding the defendant’s obstruction. The period from 1995 to 2015 independently satisfied the requirement even though Jacox began blocking the path in 2023. Once an easement appurtenant ripens, it attaches to the dominant estate and follows the land.
The court rejected Jacox’s argument that the Tharrington family’s 2016 permission to the Community Gun Club negated the hostile element. Because the prescriptive easement had already vested during the 1995–2015 period, a subsequent grant of permission by the then-owner could not destroy it—accepting Jacox’s position would allow any servient landowner to retroactively extinguish an established easement simply by later granting permissive access. On location, the court found the trial court’s description—the pathway at the end of Roy Tharrington Road, marked as the “white line on Plaintiff’s Exhibit #4” and corroborated by aerial maps and a forester’s survey—sufficiently certain. On scope, the consistent ingress-and-egress character of the use over sixty-plus years defined a reasonable road-width easement for that purpose.
Key Takeaways
- A prescriptive easement’s twenty-year period of continuous, hostile use need not immediately precede the dispute—any twenty-year window within the period of adverse use will suffice.
- An easement that has already ripened cannot be destroyed by a subsequent owner’s grant of permission to a third party; permissive use granted after the easement vests does not convert the now-established right back into a permissive license.
- A plaintiff’s agents—including a hired forester, logging contractors, and hunting club members who access, maintain, and use the pathway on the landowner’s behalf—can satisfy the open, notorious, and continuous use requirements of a prescriptive easement claim.
- When a defendant fails to challenge any findings of fact on appeal, those findings are binding; the court’s analysis is limited to whether the conclusions of law properly follow from the unchallenged facts.
Why It Matters
Alston v. Jacox reinforces two practical points for North Carolina real estate litigators. First, counsel defending against prescriptive easement claims should scrutinize the entire use history, not just the decade or two before the lawsuit; if the plaintiff can identify any uninterrupted twenty-year window, the easement may already have vested. Second, the opinion confirms that once a prescriptive easement is established, it runs with the land regardless of subsequent ownership changes on either the dominant or servient estate—a subsequent “permission” from the new servient owner cannot unwind what the law already granted.
The decision also underscores the importance of challenging findings of fact at the appellate level in bench-tried cases. Jacox’s failure to contest any of Judge Rhinehart’s factual findings left the Court of Appeals no room to reweigh the evidence, making the appeal effectively limited to pure legal arguments about the sufficiency of those unchallenged facts to support the easement.