Neighbors Said the Land Under a Garage Standing Since 1948 Was Theirs — Then the State Supreme Court Rejected Every Adverse-Possession Claim

Photo credit: AI-generated image created using ChatGPT. Illustrative only.

A garage that’s been standing since the late 1940s feels permanent in the way only old lake places do. People build their summers around it, stack generations of tools and traditions inside it, and eventually the structure starts to feel like proof of ownership all by itself. But courts don’t run on vibes, and neighbors don’t get to rewrite deed lines just because a building’s been there a long time.

That’s the hard lesson underneath a South Dakota Supreme Court decision involving two lakefront families at Pickerel Lake in the Ramona Beach subdivision. The case is Luzier v. Hemmah, decided May 13, 2026, and the opinion is available in the source material. The neighbors on one side said they’d gained ownership of a strip of land under and around two garages by adverse possession. The state’s highest court didn’t buy it, and it rejected every adverse-possession theory they brought forward.

This one reads like a familiar small-town conflict: friendly neighbors until plans change, a survey appears, feelings get hurt, and suddenly everyone is measuring dirt like it’s gold. The Supreme Court’s answer was basically: keep the deed lines where they are, even if that’s inconvenient. At the same time, it allowed something narrower so nobody had to start ripping down buildings.

A lake subdivision drawn on paper, lived on the ground

The Ramona Beach subdivision was platted back in 1925. The lots were intended to be uniform—fifty feet wide each—but the opinion explains that survey pins weren’t set at the time to mark the lines on the ground. That kind of detail matters decades later, because people tend to treat visible things—driveways, retaining walls, where you mow—as “the line,” especially when the original line isn’t obvious.

The dispute centered on the boundary between Lot 8 and Lot 9 (and later their backlots, Lots 5A and 6A). Lot 8 was bought by the Webb family in the early 1940s, and around 1947–1948 they built a driveway on the west side with a rock retaining wall along the north edge. The key problem: the opinion says the rock wall wasn’t actually built on the true property boundary. It sat a noticeable distance south of it.

Then came the garage that started the long shadow. In 1948, a past owner of Lot 9 moved the original cabin and converted it into a garage (the “small garage”). That small garage ended up so close to the rock wall that it actually crossed the line and encroached onto Lot 8.

How a second garage and a later survey lit the fuse

Fast-forward a few decades. Lot 9 was purchased by Robert and Teri Johnson in 1979. In 1981 an additional plat created west-side “outlots” (backlots) for the lakefront lots, and iron pipes were placed to mark the boundary between Lots 5A (tied to Lot 8) and 6A (tied to Lot 9). The Johnsons received a quitclaim deed to Lot 6A in 1981.

In 1997 the Johnsons built a larger garage on the southwest corner of Lot 6A. According to the opinion, this “large garage” also crossed the line—this time over the boundary between Lots 6A and 5A.

Things stayed neighborly for years after Thomas and Marsha Luzier bought Lots 6A and 9 in 2005, and Andrew and Jennifer Hemmah bought Lots 5A and 8 in 2015. The tension didn’t really hit until 2024, when the Hemmahs applied for a variance to build a garage on Lot 5A near the Luziers’ large garage. That variance request, plus a 2014 survey the Hemmahs had obtained (and didn’t share with the Luziers), brought the boundary issue into the open.

The lawsuit: adverse possession, acquiescence, and a fight over “the line”

The Luziers filed suit in 2024, saying they’d acquired ownership of a substantial portion of the Hemmahs’ land through adverse possession. The area they claimed wasn’t just the footprint of the encroaching garages. The claimed strip was described in the opinion as running along physical features like the corner of a retaining wall, then along the driveway’s rock wall, and continuing toward the lake.

The Hemmahs denied those claims and counterclaimed for trespass, asked for an injunction, and asked the court to quiet title. The circuit court issued a preliminary injunction that mostly froze things where they were: the Hemmahs had to remove a string fence, the Luziers could mow a narrow area, and neither side could do construction or remove retaining walls or otherwise change the disputed area.

Later, the Luziers amended their complaint to add boundary by acquiescence, arguing in effect that everyone had treated a certain “use line” as the boundary. But the case that reached the Supreme Court focused primarily on whether the Luziers had proved adverse possession and whether the trial court handled evidence correctly.

Why the Supreme Court didn’t accept the adverse-possession claims

Adverse possession isn’t “I used it a long time, so it’s mine now.” In South Dakota, the opinion restates that the person claiming adverse possession has to prove specific elements by clear and convincing evidence: occupation that is open and notorious, continuous for the statutory period, and under a claim of title exclusive of any other right. The statutory period is 20 years, and “tacking” can sometimes allow a current owner to add on the time of previous owners.

But there’s also a threshold problem in cases like this: occupation has to be real and tangible, not just a mental map. The opinion discusses that, absent a written instrument, you can only claim what has been “actually and continuously occupied.” And that occupation generally must rise to the level of a “substantial enclosure” (think a fence or deliberate boundary markers) or land that is “usually cultivated or improved.”

Reading between the lines of the court’s discussion, the Luziers were trying to turn various physical features—retaining walls, driveway edges, mowing patterns—into a legal boundary that would hand them a broad swath of land. The circuit court wasn’t convinced they had proved the necessary elements, and the Supreme Court agreed, affirming the decision to keep the true boundary aligned with the recorded deeds and plats.

The deposition testimony issue: the court wasn’t required to play referee on paper

The Luziers also argued that the circuit court mishandled deposition testimony because it “apparently” didn’t weigh credibility between conflicting deposition witnesses. The Supreme Court didn’t accept that argument. It emphasized the rule that appellate courts defer to trial courts on fact-finding and credibility, and they only reverse findings if they are clearly erroneous.

Here, several witnesses’ testimony was admitted by deposition, including predecessors in interest and members of the Webb family. The circuit judge noted the limitation: without seeing the witness testify live, it’s harder to sort out credibility from conflicting deposition pages alone. The Supreme Court said there was no clear error in how the trial court assessed that evidence, and it refused to reweigh the testimony on appeal.

If you’ve ever watched two grown adults argue about what “everybody knew” twenty years ago, this makes sense. Memory gets selective. People are sincere and still wrong. A court isn’t obligated to pick a winner just because the parties demand it; it has to decide whether the claimant met a high burden of proof.

No adverse possession, but the garages weren’t ordered torn down

There’s a practical side to this case, and it’s the part most homeowners will notice. Even though the Luziers lost on adverse possession, the circuit court granted prescriptive easements for the two garages that encroached onto the Hemmahs’ property. In plain terms, the deed line stayed put, but the court recognized a limited right for the garages to remain and be used as they historically had been.

An interesting wrinkle: the opinion notes the Luziers didn’t actually plead for prescriptive easements. The Hemmahs raised the concept, and when the judge asked for briefing on it, the Hemmahs were the only ones who did. Still, the trial court granted the easements and defined them narrowly—covering only the portion of the Hemmahs’ property the garages physically occupied, plus the immediate adjacent area necessary for maintenance and operation, without any right to expand the use.

The Hemmahs, for their part, challenged even that, asking the Supreme Court to review whether the trial court should have granted those easements at all. The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment as a whole, leaving those limited easements in place.

A grounded takeaway for anybody living next to other humans

If a survey shows your garage is on your neighbor’s land, you don’t fix that by getting louder, digging in, or pretending the law is basically “finders keepers.” You fix it by being honest, getting competent advice, and making decisions you can explain with a straight face ten years from now. This decision is a reminder that long-standing use can matter, but it doesn’t automatically rewrite boundaries—especially if the use isn’t clearly fenced, cultivated, or otherwise unmistakable.

And if you’re buying property—especially older lots where people have been “eyeballing it” since before you were born—don’t treat a friendly relationship as a substitute for clear paperwork. Friendships can sour under stress, and stress tends to show up right around the time someone wants to build something new. A good survey and an early conversation are cheaper than years of legal bills and the kind of resentment that lingers long after summer ends.