Sale of mineral rights at issue; family grapples with selling a historic farm
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Bob and Marlene Cook stand outside their home in Belle Vernon built in the 1770s by Col. Edward Cook. The house has been in the Cook family for six generations. Bob Cook is keeping the stone house along with a second house and 16 acres of land, but he and family members who share ownership of the 300-plus acres of property have reluctantly decided to sell the rest. -
A newspaper clipping of the Cook home from 1893.
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In Cook family lore, a broad, flat stone placed by the porch was where George Washington once stood to address his troops. A gray rock used as a planter was a watering trough. Two stones cut like steps were "upping blocks" to help ladies mount horses sidesaddle.
Another stone once marked the grave of Col. Edward Cook, who finished building the stone house at the heart of the Fayette County farm in 1776. His great-great-great-grandson, Robert J. Cook, 75, lives on the 350-acre Belle Vernon property now. He owns the stone house, a nearby red brick house and the land in between, but the rest is divided among 12 Cook heirs who live as far away as Florida, Washington, Maine and California.
The Cooks have not farmed this land for four decades, and for years the far-flung cousins struggled with the question of whether to sell the land. Now they are finding that it is what is beneath the rolling farmland that is at issue.
After years of rising taxes and responsibility, they all are ready to sell -- even Mr. Cook, a retired aircraft mechanic for U.S. Airways (although he will retain the two homes). But the family remains unsettled over parting with the land and divided on the terms they should follow before letting it go.
At first, they hoped a buyer might preserve the place as farmland, or perhaps a golf course, and many wanted to retain the mineral rights so that future owners wouldn't be able to permit the land to be disturbed by drilling.
But with the natural gas industry's rapid expansion through Pennsylvania, the family began to realize that the possibility of controlling what would happen beneath the surface was less and less likely.
Pennsylvania law includes something called "mineral estate." It pertains to the ownership of minerals underground. It can include the natural gas in the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation that underlies much of Appalachia. Such an estate can be "severed" from the surface estate and is the dominant estate. That means mineral estate owners have the right to develop or extract their holdings and must be given reasonable access to them.
First Published August 28, 2011 12:00 am
