A 1953 deed transferring land in Harrison County did not retain the rights to drill for oil and gas by stating the owner reserved the right to mine “coal or other minerals of any vein,” the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled today.

In a 6-1 decision, the Supreme Court found the seller of the land, C.C. Fay, reserved the rights to mine for coal and other solid minerals when he sold the surface rights. The decision affirmed the Seventh District Court of Appeals decision that found the current landowners, Faith Ranch and Farms Fund, rather than the heirs of C.C. and Agnes Fay, owned the oil and natural gas rights to the property.

Writing for the Court majority, Justice Megan E. Shanahan noted the Seventh District ruled the language of the mineral rights reservation to be ambiguous and turned to other evidence to determine that the Fays did not intend to reserve oil and gas rights. However, the Supreme Court determined the clause, taken as a whole, unambiguously indicated the Fays were preserving only their rights to coal and other solid minerals because of the words they chose to add to the deed.

“The absence of words commonly associated with extracting oil and gas indicates that oil and gas were not included in the reservation,” Justice Shanahan wrote.

Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy and Justices Patrick F. Fischer, R. Patrick DeWine, Joseph T. Deters, and Daniel R. Hawkins joined Justice Shanahan’s opinion.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote that the Ohio Constitution explicitly refers to both oil and gas alongside the phrase “other minerals” in the context of mining. No other words commonly associated with the extraction of oil and gas are needed to understand that a deed reserving the right to mine coal and other minerals would include oil and gas, she concluded.

Heirs, Landowners Clash Over Drilling Rights
In 1953, C.C. Fay, a noted coal mine operator, and his wife, conveyed 11 parcels of rural Harrison County land to Judson Rosebush. The deed contained a clause to reserve “all the coal below the horizon of the No. 8 coal, if any under vein exists thereunder, and other minerals, with the right to mine and remove such coal or other minerals of any vein, using any convenient underground mining methods, and to transport coal and minerals from other premises through and under the surface of said lands.”

In 1973, the land was transferred to Faith Ranch and Farms Fund, a nonprofit organization. C.C. Fay maintained the mineral rights reservation until his death in 1983, and the reservation was transferred to his heirs through trusts maintained by what is now PNC Bank. PNC Bank is not a participant in the case.

In 2021, the heirs overseeing the trust had become aware of the mineral rights reservation and requested that the Harrison County Common Pleas Court transfer the oil and gas rights to them. Faith Ranch responded with its own lawsuit, seeking an order declaring that the reservation did not include oil and gas rights and stating that those rights belong to the organization.

The trial court agreed with Faith Ranch, finding no language that would broaden the reservation to include oil and gas. The heirs appealed to the Seventh District.

The Seventh District found the deed language was ambiguous and could include oil and gas. It turned to other sources to decide the case, including reviewing three other deeds Fay issued in the 10 years before selling the land to Rosebush. Fay specifically used the terms “oil and gas” in those deeds to indicate he wanted to reserve those interests, the appeals court noted.

Because Fay possessed the knowledge to include the specific words to reserve oil and gas rights when he wanted to, the Seventh District ruled that he did not reserve those rights for the Faith Ranch property. The heirs appealed to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Analyzed Deed Language
The heirs maintained that “other minerals” include the oil and gas and the deed did not indicate the oil and gas were excluded from the phrase “other minerals.”

Justice Shanahan explained the Court agrees that “other minerals” may include oil and gas, but, in the context in which the phrase is used in the deed, it makes clear that oil and gas were excluded. She pointed to an 1897 case where the Court held that oil is a “mineral.” However, in its 1898 Detlor v. Holland decision, the Court clarified that “other minerals” do not necessarily include oil and gas. In Detlor, the Court examined a deed with a reservation using words describing matters applicable to mining minerals in place, such as coal, but not describing matters applicable to mining minerals of a migratory character, such as oil and gas. The deed said nothing about derricks, pipelines, tanks, and other “apt words” associated with oil and gas drilling. The Seventh District cited Detlor in a 2021 decision (O’Bradovich v. Hess Ohio Devs. LLC) when it ruled oil and gas rights might be included in the phrase “other minerals” when language in the deed can be reasonably seen to include those minerals.

In finding the deed unambiguous, the Court stated, as it did in Detlor, that it looked to the context in which the words were used. The Court examined definitions from three dictionaries in use near the time Fay drafted the deed. Those definitions found “mine” to refer to solid substances and did not include substances that migrate below the surface. The Court found the word “vein” was commonly used to refer to “a vein of coal” and other solids. In cases where “vein” was used to refer to oil, there were specific references to drilling for oil in the documents and words used to describe the equipment, materials, and supplies to produce and store oil and gas from wells.

The opinion concluded that the deed’s reference to “other minerals of any vein” is intended to include items of the same nature as coal, that is, a solid rock in veins, rather than a liquid or gas extracted from a pool or reservoir.

No Additional Language Required, Dissent Maintained
In her dissent, Justice Brunner wrote that the Court majority recognized that two reasonable interpretations of the reservation clause exist yet declared the language unambiguous because one interpretation is more common. The Court reached that conclusion by finding “other minerals” would include oil and gas if additional language specific to oil and gas were included.

The dissent stated that the majority’s approach differs from the Ohio Constitution, which, in Article II, Section 36, allows for laws to regulate “methods of mining, weighing, measuring, and marketing coal, oil, gas, and all other minerals.”

“This foundational source of Ohio law describes oil and gas as ‘other minerals’ and notably does so within the context of ‘mining.’ No additional words commonly associated with the extraction of oil and gas are used or needed to understand the meaning,” Justice Brunner wrote.

She criticized the majority opinion’s use of originalism in determining the meaning of “other minerals” as an “interpretive mechanism” that supplies “an advantage to one side or person” and undermines the rule of law.

She further noted that, while the use of the word “vein” might have more commonly been used with solid substances around the time Fay sold the land, a substantial number of other sources from the time also indicated that “vein” had a meaning referring to oil and gas. She would hold that the 1953 deed reserves oil and gas rights and those rights belong to the heirs.

2023-1475. Faith Ranch & Farms Fund, Inc. v. PNC Bank, Natl. Assn., Slip Opinion No. 2026-Ohio-1145.

View oral argument video of this case.

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