State Takes Family’s Land To Build Highway, But Won’t Return It After Road Project Dies
“By the force of its eminent domain authority, the state Department of Transportation took 11.3 acres from an Andover couple 27 years ago for construction of the then-planned Route 6 expressway from Bolton to Windham.
Now that expressway project is dead — but the DOT still won’t let Carolyn Sheehan, now 89, widowed, and in a wheelchair, repurchase the Andover property to reassemble a 50-acre wooded tract that had been in her family for about a century.
“I’d like to buy it back. We’ve always wanted to,” Sheehan said of the half-mile strip of land — which, as now held by the state, blocks her remaining property from direct frontage on Wheeling Road.
“They took it without asking,” Sheehan said. At the conclusion of 1987 condemnation proceedings, the Sheehans received a Superior Court award of $19,100 for their property — about $1,690 an acre.
“They said either take it or leave it,” she said. “We had to take it.”
Sheehan spoke by phone Thursday from her home on Wheeling Road, near the land taken by the DOT. Her son, Michael Sheehan of Glastonbury, said Carolyn Sheehan is in a wheelchair with round-the-clock health aides. He said the family would like to put the property back together, giving them access to the road, for reasons including the possible sale of some of it if the money is needed to care for his mother.”
Lender, Jon. The Courant 27 April 2014.