Merritt & Bourne v. Judd & Byrne

Citations

• 14 Cal. 59
• 1859 Cal. LEXIS 240

Syllabus

<p>A fixture is an article of a personal nature annexed to the freehold, and may exist on public land.</p> <p>In this State, claims to public mineral lands are recognized as titles—as legal estates of freehold, for all practical purposes—if we except some doctrine of abandonment not, perhaps, applicable to such estates.</p> <p>A steam engine and boiler, fastened to a frame of timber, bedded in the ground of a quartz ledge sufficient to make it level, with a roof or shed to protect the machinery, and used for the purpose of working the ledge, are so annexed to the freehold ar to become a fixture.</p> <p>Such machinery, when applied to quartz leads, is a trade fixture, removable by the tenant, if otherwise entitled to remove it.</p> <p>But this removal can only be during the tenancy, and during such further period of possession by the tenant as he holds the premises under a right still to consider himself a tenant, and not during the time be may actually hold possession after his lease has expired.</p> <p>This right of removal by the tenant may be regulated by agreement between the parties, and, possibly, by implication, from the custom of a particular district.</p> <p>Such machinery, so fixed, is included by the phrase in the lease, “improvements that may he put up on the ground for working the lead.” And where the lease stipulated that the improvements should go to the lessor on termination of the lease, if the rent was not paid, or if the lessee declined to purchase, as per the lease he might, the lessor’s right to the fixtures is not destroyed by the tenant contracting, subsequently, to buy, and taking a bond for title on payment of the purchase money, but failing to fulfill bis bond.</p> <p>A renewal of a lease terminates the tenant’s right to remove fixtures. So with any other agreement which terminates possession under a lease.</p> <p>Although a lessor of land cannot, in a given case, claim the fixtures, it is otherwise of the mortgagee of the lessee. Here the