by Jennifer Emens-Butler, Esq.
Tales from the Crypt (Vault)
One of the great benefits of a VBA membership is being a part of the listserves in
your practice area. For the president and
president-elect, an added “benefit” is being the recipient of ALL the listserves. While
trolling the listserves for CLE topics or issues plaguing Vermont attorneys, sometimes you find yourself eavesdropping on
some entertaining discussions. Recently,
members of the most active listserve, the
real property listserve, were fully engaged
in a trip down memory lane.
Practicing law in Vermont is full of unique
experience to be paralleled nowhere else.
One ancient practice, that survives to this
day, is the searching of records in town
clerk’s offices. Vermont is home to 251
towns, each with its own traits and set of
experiences. And while most attorneys
push for a unified system of recording to
better serve their clients and to promote
an efficient practice, they also revel in the
quirkiness of Vermont practice and secretly
hope that some things never change.
Crediting Fletcher Proctor with the title “Tales from the Crypt (Vault),” all other
contributors, while listed in the footnotes,
will not be matched with their comments.
Also to protect the innocent clerks, living or deceased, no town names or clerk
names will be repeated. What follows are
the highlights of the experiences shared by
our Vermont practitioners on the real property listserve.1
Any attorney who has performed title
searches in Vermont will certainly relate to
these stories. Before I first started practicing in Vermont, while clerking, I found that
much of learning what the practice of law
in Vermont means is learning where all the
towns and courts are. You can’t be a Vermont practitioner without knowing that
Chittenden is not in Chittenden County (or
Essex) or that you never endeavor to perform a title search without calling first to
find out (a) if they are open, despite any
published hours, and (b) if the property
is indeed in the same town as the client’s
mailing address.
These somewhat humorous tales of woe
fell into three categories: odd search locations, odd personalities, or odd recording
methods. While many of the stories came
from deep in the recesses of our members’
minds, frighteningly, some occurrences
were very recent. First up: prime locations.
Desolation
On a recent search, one of our members
found himself searching in a vault around
30
and next to an oil tank. The practitioner
cautioned that if you went to this town in
the winter you should take suitable gloves
because the room is unheated and you
could freeze your hand to the vault door if
you’re not careful. The attorney took a picture of the office and sent it to the listserve.
This photo showed that there really was a
phone perched on top of the oil tank, put
in place by the clerk so she wouldn’t have
to dash back into the office if the phone
rang.
At one point, this clerk’s office was in
the clerk’s personal garage. For a search
she would only allow attorneys to have one
book at a time and she insisted on getting
them herself. Instead of finding the books,
searchers were left in her living room at a
card table awaiting each single volume.
This table was frequently inhabited by one
of the clerks twelve or more cats.
Heated searches are often a luxury. In
the 1970s, one of our members traveled
one fine January day to the land records,
then stored in what previously had been a
chicken coop semi-attached to the clerk’s
home. Searchers always had difficulty taking notes in winter while bundled up in parkas and gloves, and on this particular day,
the temperature inside the unheated structure was in the mid-teens. While chicken
coop searches may be a thing of the past,
search locations are still far from high-tech.
Many may recall some searches after hurricane Irene. One was notably performed in
a train container car with a portable copier
set up by way of lengthy extension cords
strung together to reach the main building.
Historically, the clerk’s offices were often
in a clerk’s home. One clerk used to have
the books all kept in a gun safe in a mobile home on her property. While searching in the mobile home, the searcher would
have to move some of the clerk’s decorations (she had decorations for all seasons
covering all horizontal surfaces) in order to
work. In another location, the town “vault”
was in the clerk’s bedroom closet amidst
the hanging clothing. A member recalled
doing a search in that same town right next
to where the clerk was canning corn on the
kitchen table.
The search conditions in these home locations were usually far from ideal. One
member wrote regarding searches mad