Find the land nobody owns.

In 1904, T.M. Campbell (later Governor of Texas) sold a 165-acre tract adjacent to a railroad right-of-way. He never explicitly included a 6-acre strip underneath the rail line. For 70+ years, oil was pumped from beneath that strip while its true ownership remained ambiguous. When the heirs finally sued Union Pacific and Anadarko in Glover v. Union Pacific (2006), the court applied the strips-and-gores doctrine: because Campbell never reserved the strip, it passed with the larger tract. Decades of mineral production proceeds were on the line — all because a narrow strip was left out of one deed in 1904.

A developer was selling a property comprising eleven contiguous parcels. During the title search, a 6,000-square-foot sliver of land (12 feet wide by 500 feet long) appeared in the middle of the property that the original owner from 1859 had never conveyed. The orphaned strip landlocked two of the eleven parcels, blocking access to the nearest public road. It took a quiet title action, a title examiner, and a surveyor testifying in court to resolve what a single spatial scan of the deed chain could have caught. The sale was nearly torpedoed by a 167-year-old surveying omission.

In 1970, a landowner sold 30.5 acres to the State of Texas for Highway 360 construction, reserving mineral rights. Two years later, he sold the remaining 55-acre adjacent tract without mentioning the highway minerals. For decades, the minerals under the road were worthless — you couldn't drill vertically under an active highway. Then horizontal drilling technology changed everything. In Green v. Chesapeake (2018), the court ruled the strip-and-gore doctrine applied: the highway minerals passed with the adjacent tract because they had no practical value at the time of conveyance. Chesapeake Exploration and the landowner's heirs fought over minerals that technology had turned from worthless to a fortune.