This story is interesting to me because of something that happened here, in 
York County, back in the early 1990's.
There was a very nice, hard-working man (who happened to be an African- 
American) whose family had long acquired some land that was no where near 
any water but still considered "wetlands".
When he prepared to give some parcels of that land to his children so that 
they could build houses near the house that they had grown up in the 
environmentalists (local and federal) informed him that his children would 
never be allowed to build on that land as it was "non-tidal wetlands". The 
old fellow fought the powers that be as best he could and finally gave up. 
So he went down to the courthouse and had his land declared valueless so 
that he could stop pay ever growing, exorbitant taxes on the land which was 
quite valuable.
The worst part of the story is that a few years after that ,VDOT condemned 
his land so the road could be expanded and he received nothing for the 
condemnation suit because, after all, the land was worthless.
This is a true story. My husband was on the Board of Supervisors and did his 
best to help this fine, old gentleman but nothing worked. So much for the 
working out of justice.


the land, especially near the water was becoming very
> valuable. Because the railroad near went down there after the civil war, 
> the land had not had much value in the late 19th century, so it passed 
> often into the hands of black watermen or farmers. A century later their 
> descendants were beginning to get high prices for that land--perhaps the 
> working out of justice, in a way.

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