## Facts

- Plaintiffs owned and improved approximately forty acres in Castleton, New York, including an expensive dwelling, graded and terraced grounds, roads and walks, and ornamental and useful trees and shrubs.
- Defendant owned adjoining land used as a brickyard located south of plaintiffs’ dwelling and woods.
- In firing brick kilns with anthracite coal, sulphuric acid gas was generated and, depending on wind direction, reached plaintiffs’ land.
- In 1869 and 1870, repeated exposures killed foliage and ultimately destroyed roughly 100–150 valuable pine and spruce trees and injured plaintiffs’ grape vines and plum trees.
- Gas emissions were intermittent, typically occurring during the final two days of kiln burning, and affected plaintiffs’ property primarily when winds blew from the south.
- Plaintiffs sought damages for past injury and an injunction to restrain further harmful brick burning; a referee found causation and substantial injury and granted damages and injunctive relief.

## Issues

1. Whether defendant’s brick-burning emissions causing substantial damage to neighboring vegetation constituted a private nuisance.
2. Whether an injunction was an available remedy, or whether damages at law were an adequate remedy.
3. Whether defendant established a prescriptive right to continue the harmful use, or whether plaintiffs’ delay/acquiescence barred equitable relief.
4. Whether a procedural objection regarding the number of judges participating in the appeal invalidated the judgment.

## Decision

- The New York Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment for plaintiffs.
- The court held the brick-burning operations, as conducted, constituted a private nuisance because they caused substantial, recurring, and tangible injury to plaintiffs’ property.
- The court upheld injunctive relief because the harm was continuing and damages were inadequate and would invite repeated litigation.
- The court rejected defenses of prescription and laches/acquiescence.
- The court rejected the procedural objection and held the judgment was not void on that ground.

## Legal Principles

- A landowner’s right to use property is limited by the duty to make reasonable use and avoid unnecessary, substantial injury to neighboring property.
- A private nuisance exists where a defendant’s use of land substantially and unreasonably interferes with another’s use and enjoyment, including through physical injury to trees and other property.
- Equity may enjoin a nuisance when the injury is continuing or likely to recur, difficult to value fully in money, or would otherwise require a multiplicity of actions.
- A prescriptive right to maintain an otherwise actionable nuisance requires proof of adverse, continuous, and substantially unchanged use for the prescriptive period.
- Delay or inaction bars equitable relief only when it amounts to acquiescence that materially prejudices the defendant (for example, by inducing detrimental reliance).

## Conclusion

The court treated repeated, wind-driven emissions that killed and damaged neighboring trees and vines as a substantial private nuisance and affirmed an injunction because the harm was ongoing and not fully compensable through money damages, while rejecting claims of prescription, laches, and procedural invalidity.


Campbell v. Seaman, 63 N.Y. 568 (N.Y. 1876)