My granddaughter drove up from Kerrville that night and read the first page of Rosas tin box by lantern light in the chapel, then stopped and looked at me and said, Grandpa, do you know what this is, and I said, tell me, and she said, this is the original land grant, and it is airtight.
The man from the preserve had leaned on his truck and told me his clients were buying the whole valley for exotic game, that a title search showed problems with our original homestead deed, that Rosas family may never have owned the creek section, that theyd take it to court.
He did not know what Rosa kept in the chapel on the hill.
The tin box held the original 1834 Spanish land grant, sealed and signed, conveying this land to Rosas great-great-grandfather, a grant that predates Texas itself and settles the title to every acre including the creek section the preserve claimed we never owned.
Rosas great-grandfather homesteaded here, but the land went back further than that, to an 1834 grant that Rosas family had kept safe for nearly two hundred years, and Rosa kept it in the little stone chapel on the hill where we married our daughter, because to her it was sacred, the proof that this ground was her familys before there was a county to file a deed in.
An original land grant is the root of title. Everything after it flows from it. The preserves title search found problems in later paperwork only because they never went back far enough to find the grant that makes all of it valid. My granddaughter had it authenticated at the university, and the historians there were beside themselves to see an intact 1834 grant still in the family that received it.
When the man from the preserve came back, I did not argue. I had my granddaughter hand him a certified translation of the 1834 grant and I said, you told me to get a lawyer. My lawyer was Rosa, and she left me this. This land was granted to her family in 1834, sealed and signed. The title is airtight, back to before Texas was Texas. Take that to court, and youll lose, and youll pay to have taught the whole state a history lesson.
He did not go to court. The preserve bought around us, and the twelve hundred acres stayed Rosas familys, as they have been for a hundred and ninety years.
One way or another, he had said, on Rosas family land. It stayed hers. She planted the live oaks along the creek and built the chapel on the hill, and she kept the 1834 grant on the altar, because she always knew that someday somebody would come, and she wanted her family to have the oldest paper in the valley waiting for them.