James leaned back in his chair. The ceiling fan turned slow overhead, pushing warm air through the room. “Like, what kind of move?” he asked. “The kind where she does something so public and so illegal that no judge, no jury, and no licensing board can look the other way.” James thought about that for a long time.
Then he said, “I can wait.” Harlan didn’t have to wait long. Patricia’s next move came dressed in a surveyor’s vest and a clipboard. On a Wednesday morning in late March, James was in the barn brushing Duke when he heard the crunch of tires on the oyster shell drive. He walked out and found a white pickup truck parked near his east fence line, the boundary between Whitfield and Palmetto Crest.
A man in an orange reflective vest was hammering a wooden stake into the ground about 40 feet inside James’s property line. James walked over. “Morning. What are you doing?” The man looked up, mid-30s, nervous eyes, the expression of someone who knows he’s standing on unstable ground in more ways than one.
“Survey crew. Got a work order for a boundary assessment.” “Whose work order?” The man handed James a folded sheet of paper. It was printed on Palmetto Crest Estates letterhead.
The work order described a community boundary verification project and directed the survey crew to establish the correct property line between Palmetto Crest common areas and the adjacent agricultural parcel. It was signed by Patricia Davenport, president. The correct property line, according to Patricia’s document, ran 40 feet west of the actual recorded boundary. Forty feet of James’s land, including a section of his horse pasture and the eastern edge of his spring-fed pond were marked on Patricia’s map as Palmetto Crest community green space. James looked at the stake the man had just driven into his pasture.
Then he looked at the map. Then he looked at the surveyor. “Do you have a license?” The man swallowed. “I’m not the surveyor.
I’m the crew. The surveyor signed off on the plat from the office.” “Who’s the surveyor?” “Dennis Corley. Corley Land Services.”
Corley Land Services. James knew the name. Dennis Corley had done survey work for Greer Whitman Partners, the developer that built Palmetto Crest. He wasn’t an independent surveyor conducting a neutral boundary assessment. He was a contractor working for the same developer whose subdivision was trying to absorb James’s land.
James pulled out his phone and took photographs of the stakes, the work order, the truck, and the crew member’s face. Then he said calmly, the way a man speaks when he’s been trained to de-escalate situations involving armed suspects and finds a clipboard almost quaint by comparison, “Pull those stakes, leave my property, and tell Mr. Corley that if he files a plat that moves my boundary line by a single inch, I’ll have him in front of the South Carolina Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors before the ink dries.” The crew left within 15 minutes. James called Harlan, who called the Board of Registration by lunch. The Board confirmed that no authorized survey had been requested or approved for the Whitfield property.
