The book was a 1799 London edition of William Cowper's poems, bound in calf, somewhat foxed. It had been in the family of Henrietta Bowen of Bennington, Vermont, for at least four generations. She was seventy-three years old in April 1956. She had decided to clean her bookshelves.

The letter fell out of the volume between the title page and the dedication. It was folded into eight, addressed on the outer fold to Mr. Ira Allen, surveyor, and dated March 11, 1781.

Bowen, who had taught school in Bennington for forty-one years and had retired in 1949, recognized that what she held was not ordinary. She read the letter twice and then walked it down to the office of the town clerk, Wilbur Hannay, the same afternoon.

Hannay recognized the signature. It belonged to Captain Stephen Fay of Bennington, the proprietor of the Catamount Tavern, who had been one of the most prominent figures in the early settlement of southern Vermont. Fay had died in 1781, four months after the letter was written.

The letter concerned a strip of land along the western boundary of what is now the town of Pownal, comprising approximately 340 acres of mixed farmland and woodlot. The strip had been in dispute since 1759.

The dispute arose from the conflicting land grants issued by the colonial governments of New Hampshire and New York during the years preceding Vermont's establishment as an independent republic. New Hampshire had granted the parcel in 1761 to a settler named Ebenezer Walbridge. New York had granted it again in 1769 to a New York City merchant named Cornelius Roosevelt.

Walbridge had farmed the land. Roosevelt had never seen it.

After Vermont became a state in 1791, the dispute should, in principle, have been resolved under the state's land office procedures. In practice, the descendants of Walbridge and the descendants of Roosevelt had continued to file overlapping claims through the nineteenth century. The most recent active claim, filed by a New York family named Roosevelt Stevens in 1929, was still pending in the Bennington County Probate Court in 1956.

The historian Charles Morrissey, in his 1981 study of Vermont land titles, counted seventeen separate filings in the matter between 1791 and 1929. Some had been settled by partial accommodation. None had been settled by determination of original right.

“The historian Charles Morrissey, in his 1981 study of Vermont land titles, counted seventeen separate filings in the matter between 1791 and 1929.”

The 1781 letter changed the question.

In it, Stephen Fay described to Ira Allen, the surveyor general of the new republic of Vermont, a meeting that had been held at the Catamount Tavern on February 28, 1781, at which Cornelius Roosevelt, traveling north from New York, had formally and in writing relinquished his claim to the 340 acres in question. Fay enclosed, in the original letter, a copy of Roosevelt's relinquishment.

The copy was no longer with the letter when Bowen found it. The letter itself, however, described the relinquishment in detail and named two witnesses, the tavern keeper Jonas Fay (Stephen's son) and a Bennington physician named Jonas Galusha.

The letter also explained why the relinquishment had not been recorded. Roosevelt, according to Fay, had asked that the matter be kept private until after his return to New York, and Fay had agreed. The original relinquishment, Fay wrote, was to be filed with the Vermont land office on May 1, 1781.

Fay had died on April 13, 1781. The land office filing had not been made.

Bowen's discovery, in 1956, was therefore a piece of evidence that the original 1769 New York claim had been formally extinguished within the lifetime of its claimant, but that the extinguishment had not entered the public record because of an untimely death.

The Bennington County Probate Court took up the matter on May 8, 1956. The court asked Bowen to deposit the letter with the clerk's office. She did. It is now held, with associated correspondence and the court's findings, in the Vermont State Archives in Montpelier, in a folder labeled Walbridge v. Roosevelt Stevens, Final Disposition.

The Roosevelt Stevens family, represented by a New York attorney named Lawrence Whittaker, did not initially accept the letter as dispositive. Whittaker argued, in a brief filed in July 1956, that the letter was hearsay, that the relinquishment itself was not produced, and that the chain of custody of the letter from 1781 to 1956 was undocumented.

The court took the arguments under advisement. The Walbridge descendants, represented by a Bennington attorney named Phillip Quinlan, responded with a brief drawing on the Catamount Tavern records of the period, which corroborated Fay's account of the February 1781 meeting in independent contemporary sources.

The corroborating records had been known since the nineteenth century. They had not, until 1956, been read in connection with the land dispute.

On October 12, 1956, the probate court issued a brief decision. The court found that the 1781 letter, combined with the contemporary tavern records, constituted sufficient evidence to establish that Cornelius Roosevelt had relinquished his claim in person and in writing prior to his departure from Bennington. The court held that the 340 acres had vested in the Walbridge line as of February 28, 1781, and that all subsequent New York claims, including the 1929 filing, were therefore without merit.

The decision was not appealed.

The historian Morrissey, writing twenty-five years later, called the resolution the longest-running property case in American legal history to be settled by a letter in a book. He may have been right. The Bennington County clerk's office knows of no longer one.

Henrietta Bowen lived until 1971. She received a small honorarium from the Vermont Historical Society in 1957, which she donated to the Bennington Free Library. She did not, according to her surviving niece, ever speak of the letter except when asked about it directly, and then briefly.

The 340 acres are now divided. Part is in agricultural use, part is in forest, part is part of a state hiking trail. The Walbridge descendants, the current owners of record, are a family named Holcomb who farm a dairy operation outside Pownal village.

They knew, vaguely, that there had once been a question about the title. They had not, until a journalist from the Bennington Banner told them in 1956, known how old the question was.

Some disputes close because someone wins. Others close because someone finds something. The 1781 letter in the 1799 copy of Cowper's poems closed a dispute that had outlived everyone who could remember its beginning. The book is still in the Bowen family. The letter is in Montpelier. The farm is in production.