Estate of Oliver

Citations

• 136 Pa. 43

Syllabus

<p>(a) The articles of association of a joint-stock company, formed for the purpose of purchasing, developing and selling mineral lands, provided that the property of the association should be.vested in trustees, chosen from among the stockholders, who should have power to purchase, sell and convey both real and personal property.</p> <p>(J) The articles provided, further, that the interest of each member of the association, in its property, should be represented and measured by his shares of stock, which should be transferable by assignment, recorded in the books of the company, and a surrender of the original stock certificate:</p> <p>1. Whatever the liability of the members to third persons may be, such an association is an artificial person, capable of acquiring, holding and selling property in its associate capacity; the stockholders therein have no title to its lands, but merely a resulting interest in its assets ascertainable only by an account.</p> <p>2. Such company is not dissolved by the death of a member, nor is the nature of his interest as a stockholder such that it is changed thereby; and a dividend declared upon the stock after his death has the same character, and is governed by the same rules, as though declared in his lifetime.</p> <p>3. Wherefore, when a testator, owning such stock, has bequeathed the income of his estate to one person for life, with a gift of the principal to another in remainder, a dividend upon the stock out of the proceeds of a sale of land, made after his death, the association still retaining its capital unimpaired, is income within the terms of tiie will.</p> <p>4. Such income, though amounting to more than 1,000 per cent upon the capital, must go to the life-tenant, if earned after the testator’s death: Earp’s App., 28 Pa. 368; and it must be regarded as so earned when the profit on the sale of the land was due to a discovery of mineral deposits after his death, though that discovery was not made by the company itself.</p