United States v. Cumberland Farms of Connecticut, Inc.

FINDINGS OF FACT AND CONCLUSIONS OF LAW 1

YOUNG, District Judge.

At the inauguration of President Kennedy, Robert Frost read a poem which began:

The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people.

Frost, R., “The Gift Outright,” The Poetry of Robert Frost, Lathem, E. ed., at 348 (1969). In imagery strikingly parallel to the facts of this case, Frost evokes memories of the colonists who, without benefit of bulldozers and earth moving machinery, cleared the land in order to plant. Cutting away the bark, the colonists girdled the trees…