In Kanabec County, years-long legal battle over disputed gravel road nears a final judgment

MORA, MINN. – Hornet Street is a gravel road that intersects with a Kanabec County highway outside this small central Minnesota town.

To the naked eye, the road isn’t much: Less than a mile of gravel connecting a few homes on farmland to the outside world. But Hornet Street has become the central character in a years-long saga not quite 100 miles north of the Twin Cities, one that pits neighbor against neighbor in Hillman Township and its 432 residents.

Hornet Street goes a quarter mile to an old house owned by the Schmoll family. There’s a small sign — “TOWNSHIP ROAD ENDS HERE”— and then the road continues another quarter mile to a cul-de-sac. Turn left and a long driveway leads to a new solar-powered house and the Crisman family’s 60 head of grass-fed cattle.

Places like this aren’t used to legal disputes with lifers fighting newcomers. Stands of evergreens tower over snow-covered farm fields. A roadside sign advertises “Sasquatch Solutions Handyman Services.” Hillman Township is quiet, and residents like it that way.

The row over Hornet Street has changed that.

The question at hand — tied up in court battles and governmental disputes for years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees for all sides — is whether there’s a difference between the first quarter mile of Hornet Street and the second quarter mile. In 2021, township supervisors essentially declared the north end of the road doesn’t exist, citing a law about townships not maintaining abandoned roads.

A county judge called the action “unreasonable and absurd,” and township electors voted to end an appeal of the decision. Township supervisors refused to drop their appeal, calling the vote improper. An appellate judge agreed with the township, saying it had no duty to maintain the road. As a compromise, the township extended a different road to the Crismans’ property line. The Crismans, who note the township still maintains six stretches of road where no one lives, refused to build a second driveway to that road, calling it unfair cronyism by the township.

It’s both a simple story — is this section of Hornet Street a properly maintained township road, or is it a private driveway? — and a maddeningly complicated one.

A district court hearing this week will determine whether the road is under township jurisdiction or is private property. After mediation in December, the county agreed to force the township to maintain the road — if the judge deems it a road. The judge has 90 days to issue a summary judgment.

Both sides have dug deep, finding decades-old records from the Kanabec History Center, getting affidavits from workers who plowed snow here in the 1980s. Both sides portray themselves as victims of harassment or bullying and accuse the other side of lies and intimidation.

“Taking away a road we rely on every day wasn’t something the township was forced by law to do,” said Renee Crisman, who lives on Hornet Street with her husband and three daughters. “It was a conscious choice, an abuse of power.”

“The last 120 years, it’s never been a problem until the Crismans created a problem,” replied Dan Schmoll, 60, raised in the now-empty house on the part of Hornet Street closest to the county road. He now lives a mile away, and with his mother he owns land on each side of Hornet Street. “They think they’re smarter than everybody else and should get whatever they want.”

For close to a century, all of Hornet Street was a proper township road dead-ending at a family farm. The township stopped maintaining it in the 1980s when a family from southern Minnesota owned it and rented out the farmland, Crisman said.

In retrospect, there was a red flag during the 2013 closing, Crisman said. She recalls Schmoll driving up on his tractor and telling them he wanted the property but couldn’t come up with the money: “He said, ‘You guys paid too much, I wanted it, it was too expensive, nice to meet you.’ Then he drove away.”

The Crismans moved from Shoreview into their new home in 2017. In 2019, they put 100 loads of gravel on the road. That’s when Schmoll installed some posts and drew his line in the sand.

Schmoll paints the dispute as the Crismans covering up their own mistake for buying a place on a road that’s no longer maintained.

The dispute has deeper implications than just whether the township plows their snow. Their three daughters, ages 8, 9 and 11, travel more than a half mile for bus pickup. New fiber internet lines have been blocked from the Crismans' property, and they must pick up mail from a P.O. box miles away.

Complicated laws govern township roads.

The first time the Crismans sued had to do with a 25-year law: Once a road hasn’t been maintained for more than 25 years, the township may not begin maintaining the road again unless electors vote for it. Township electors did vote to maintain the road in 2022, but township supervisors didn’t abide by the result. Schmoll maintains the Crismans “stacked the deck” in the vote.

The current lawsuit revolves around a 40-year law: the Minnesota Marketable Title Act. The law simplifies land transactions by eliminating old claims, like a statute of limitations for real estate, though there are common-sense exceptions.

The township board cited that law in stating it can’t make a claim to Hornet Street and saying it belongs to Schmoll and his mother.

“Just on a purely legal perspective — and I know there’s emotion and common sense involved — but the law prevails,“ said Bob Alsop, an attorney representing Hillman Township. ”And the law says we don’t own it. They have a road to their property, and that’s all the township has to provide.”

Advocates for Minnesota townships fear downstream effects if all of Hornet Street is deemed a township road.

As rural population decreases, some township roads are barely used, and Minnesota laws allow for townships to remove them as a taxpayer burden.

“This family feels there’s some kind of entitlement. The township is saying, no, there’s not an entitlement,” said Steve Fenske, general counsel for the Minnesota Association of Townships. “The township is balancing budgets, balancing the desires of lots of different taxpayers. There isn’t a right to a road in the place that’s most convenient to the landowner.”

In a court filing last week, the Crismans’ attorney Erik Hansen argued the township’s position is “both illogical and impractical.” Abandoning such roads when they’re in use would call into question similar roads across the state and “leave people without access to their homes, businesses, and communities,” he argued.

Hansen believes the township is grasping for legal arguments to justify picking on one family.

“The township is spending a pile of taxpayer money trying to cut off one taxpayer from access to the township’s roads while keeping the access for a different taxpayer,” Hansen told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “I fail to see the logic of that beyond the personalities in play here. They’ve done it to be a bad neighbor.”

Township leaders believe they offered a fair compromise. The township extended a nearby street another 200 feet to the Crisman property line and offered $15,000 to help build a long driveway.

The Crismans call the offer silly: Why build a driveway through farmland when a perfectly acceptable road already exists?

And, Renee Crisman notes, neighbors near that road live on a quiet cul-de-sac and don’t want slaughter trucks and other farm equipment disturbing their quiet.

Dan Schmoll “wanted control of this property,” Renee Crisman said. “He sees this, and some other folks up here do too, as their rural area. They grew up here. We’re outsiders.”

The Crismans point to a former township board member who phoned the superintendent to stop bus service for the Crismans because the road “does not exist.” The superintendent rebuffed the request: “We are in the business of getting kids to school,” he replied, according to an affidavit.

The two sides also don’t agree on how much it would cost the township to improve and maintain the road. Schmoll and his allies say restoring Hornet Street to township maintenance could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Where do you draw the line?” Schmoll said.

But Andy Crisman calculates it would just cost basic maintenance for a quarter mile — about $500 a year.

“If we give in, they’ll do this to somebody else who may not have the resources,” said Andy Crisman. “God has put this on our shoulders for a reason. We’re not going to just go away after being wronged and being bullied here.”