Thanks. Kind of what I thought but I intend to check with the township and county. Everyone else in town has been hunting that land, I should too! I posted it in the Spring and now every farm and owner around me is treating me like a Yankee carpetbagger. Bills have been coming to me since 2019 and I’ve been paying the taxes.
Sorry about the mistreatment. Locals think that by treating anybody new to the neighborhood like a Yankee carpetbagger will intimidate new owners, and allow the locals to run the show. Because a person was not born and raised on the same street as the "locals" doesn't mean they're outsider's, rather, it gives the "locals" an excuse to try to intimidate and bully new landowners and control the neighborhood to their own advantage while someone else pays the taxes. Experience teaches that if you don't allow yourself to be intimidated by these "local" bullies, they soon move on to easier pickings and in a few short years as you make a few new "real" local friends, the neighborhood soon considers you as belonging there just like everyone else who came from "somewhere else" to here.
My guidelines for new property owners are;
#1, I will be very polite, but very firm: I'm glad to meet you and I hope we'll be friends, but it's my land and I'll use it as I please, "without needing to inform you what that will be". No, your family didn't hunt it since Abraham Lincoln, and no, that doesn't give you current hunting rights anyway, and no, you can't hunt here, and no, neither can you "just" walk across in hunting season, and no, neither can you walk across when it's not hunting season. That's five no's; No, no, no, no, and no.
#2, I will make good friends with as many of the close neighbors and land-joiners as I can, I need you people as much as you need me, and I will go to significant expense to be friends with you. But no, we won't be friends if we can only be friends if you have hunting rights. Having to meet certain conditions like hunting rights for friendship isn't friendship, it's appeasement.
#3, I will mark the property line well for my neighbors benefit as much as for my own, that way we both know where it is. And I will make a perimeter trail 25-50 feet in from the property line the entire way around my property line if I can. A perimeter trail is as useful as posted signs for keeping people off, trespassers get nervous if they don't when a patroller will come along the perimeter road, and crossing a road to enter gives an honest poacher pause, but the really bad ones of course don't care. These are usually communistic minded individuals who don't own much themselves, hate the freedom of property ownership, and think everything should belong to everyone. Move back to Europe where you came from where there's no property lines because ordinary people don't own anything. The good news is that there's always some people in the neighborhood who respect freedom, and respect you for who you are, and want to be friends. These are usually the people that you meet last in a new neighborhood.
