Wiry branches lapped at the side mirrors of Jose Cambrils’s black Dodge Ram as he lumbered deeper into the woods of Canterbury.
Whitney Hill Road is so constricted a corridor that the pick-up truck lurched along at five miles an hour, a plume of deerflies attaching to it as the road attenuated further and further. A stately oak came into view, and Cambrils pressed the brake pedal.
Nailed to the tree were three scraggly strips of coral surveyor’s tape marking where 40 acres of forgotten land began. Forgotten because its last known owner died in 1899.
The land is sandwiched between two properties belonging to Cambrils: 83 acres to the south and 30 acres to the north. Fluorescent yellow notices with his name are posted on trees along the road front.
The grizzled state representative, who lives in Loudon, returns here every fall to prime the woods for hunting season — “a little cut here, a little there, and the next thing you know you have a nice visible lane.” When he isn’t perched in a hunting stand, lying in wait for deer, grouse, rabbit or other small game, he and his nephews might cross all three parcels to stalk their prey on foot. He has been maintaining and making use of the land in this way for more than 25 years.
“No one ever came to me and said — the town, my neighbors, my abutters, no one ever came and said, ‘That’s not your land, it’s our land.’ No one has. The only person that’s ever put in a claim to this land is myself,” he said.
In 2023, Cambrils filed a quitclaim deed seeking to take possession of the contested land. Quitclaim deeds can be used to legally transfer ownership of a property from one person to another. Since then, Cambrils said disagreements with his attorney led him to end their professional relationship and, with it, his pursuit of the land.
The town’s involvement, however, was only just beginning. When the Merrimack County Register of Deeds recorded Cambrils’ quitclaim deed, it triggered a genealogical manhunt for the property’s legal, living owners.
The quitclaim deed also returned the property, unclaimed for several decades, to the town’s tax rolls. In the last three years, the land has accrued $3,748.36 in unpaid taxes. The town has the right to reclaim possession of the land based on nonpayment of these taxes. In June, as the deadline approached for the town to determine whether it would do so, the Board of Selectmen voted to extend their search for rightful owners and revisit the subject next year.
On paper, these intervening 40 acres don’t belong to Cambrils. They don’t belong to the town of Canterbury. And ongoing outreach to the descendants of the last known owners has, so far, yielded 57 names, nine responses and one site visit, but not one person with legal documentation of ownership, according to Town Administrator Ken Folsom.
If the town’s search turns up empty, and if Cambrils chooses to pursue a legal recourse called adverse possession, the land may one day become his. At least for now, it continues to exist as a literal no-man’s-land.
“I’m going to continue to treat it as mine until such a point in time as the town has taken it over, or they’ve found the proper heir and they’ve taken it over, or they make me the owner. There are only three different things that can happen here,” Cambrils said. “Or I suppose it could also stay in limbo.”
Past and present history
The recorded history of what the town of Canterbury has come to refer to as the “Lovering property” begins in 1878, when two tracts of land came into the possession of Samuel Lovering, deeded to him by his son-in-law. The first tract summed an “undisclosed acreage,” according to research compiled by town clerk and tax collector Sam Papps; the second amounted to 40 acres of land.
Samuel died in 1899, leaving the majority of his estate, including both properties, to his son, Frank Orville Lovering. Fifty years later, in 1949, Frank died. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his nephews Maurice and Bertram Mudgett, of California, who in turn sold a 21-acre portion of the property to a buyer in Concord. The Mudgett brothers were operating “under the assumption that the land was all sold,” according to Papps’ notes.
That the contested 40-acre tract would be forgotten stems from a clerical error dating back to the time of Frank Lovering’s death, overlooked and unconsidered as the land frequently changed hands.
In 1999, Jose Cambrils bought the neighboring properties.
At first glance, the 40 acres seemed abandoned, but since property tax maps told a different story, Cambrils queried the town in 2001. “It made all the sense in the world to consolidate the land so that I could again work and walk through it freely,” he said.
Sitting at a corner booth at the Eggshell Restaurant in Loudon, just a few minutes down the road, he proffered a manila folder thick with 26 years of documents that chronicle his informal relationship to the Lovering land, including the results of a land survey and title search he paid for out of pocket.
He traced the lines of the town’s brief response with a neatly trimmed fingernail and read aloud the words that acquit him of any accusations of trying to take over town-owned land.
“Our records indicate that the Town of Canterbury does not have possession of that parcel of land through either a ‘Quit Claim’ deed or a ‘Tax Collector’s’ deed,” Michael Capone, then chairman of the board of selectmen, wrote.
Since the town did not positively know who had possession of the property, Cambrils began to look after it, as he did for 23 years before filing his quitclaim deed. Although he sees his political position as unrelated to his claim to the land, Cambrils is running for reelection this year and said he worries that misinformation about the property will hurt his campaign for a fourth term in the State House.
Last week, he was unhappy to see a smattering of yard signs peppered across Canterbury and Loudon advertising the domain josestealsland.net. The website directs visitors to the Monitor’s previous reporting and leads with the acrostic poem: Just One candidate Steals land from Everyone.
Cambrils filed a complaint with the Election Law Unit of the Attorney General’s office, proposing that the signs violated RSA 664:14 by omitting a signature or attribution. The office declined to investigate further based on the fact that they were distributed by “an individual acting on his own behalf,” as Cambrils suspects, and not a political committee or other organization, according to email communications reviewed by the Monitor.
The language, however disturbing to Cambrils, also does not violate election law, since it constitutes implicit advocacy rather than express advocacy, the Election Unit said.
“It’s not town land that I did something sort of nefarious to, as if my political position would give me some privilege or would help me to steal land. It doesn’t. My political position gets me through the toll booths for free, and it gets me $100 a year,” Cambrils said. “I did everything the right way, did everything by the book, and I did everything under a lawyer’s advice. What more can I do?”
The search continues
Cambrils has already been granted one of his wishes: that the town include the Mudgett lineage in its search for legal owners.
A list of potential heirs obtained by the Monitor shows a net cast wide, from Maryland, Virginia, Florida and Louisiana to Texas, New York and California.
“Our advice has always been, ‘Seek legal counsel to determine whether you are actually a potential heir and whether you have legal standing.’ Some people have been very interested, and some haven’t been interested at all,” said Folsom.
The town is not accepting redemption payments in exchange for a legal claim to land — neither potential heirs nor Cambrils can pay the taxes owed on the property and bring this dispute to a neat resolution. Without a rightful owner identified, the town has mailed tax bills to a Post Office box under its own name, a “standard practice” when ownership is undetermined, according to Folsom.
Apart from that, Folsom said, nothing about this predicament is normal.
“Unless we have documentation from court, probate or Superior Court, that determines that Mr. Smith of somewhere in Florida is the legal owner of this property, then the town is not going to assign ownership,” Folsom said. “We’ve never had a situation like this.”
