The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will not review a Superior Court ruling that held that the Dunham Rule, which presumes that deed reservations of “minerals” do not include oil and gas rights, is inapplicable to tax sales.

The justices on Oct. 10 denied appeals by two sets of trustees in Cornwall Mountain Investments v. Thomas E. Proctor Heirs Trust. The allocatur denial let stand a decision by a unanimous three-judge panel upholding a Lycoming County trial judge's ruling that the transfer of mineral rights from the subsurface owners to the surface owner of property in Cogan House Township in a 1932 tax sale included oil and gas.

According to the appeals court's published opinion, the defendant trustees of the Margaret O.F. Proctor Trust traced their ownership of the oil and gas rights to an 1894 deed reserving to Thomas E. Proctor and his heirs the rights to “'all the natural gas, coal, coal oil, petroleum, marble, and all minerals of every kind and character in, upon, or under the said land.'” Plaintiffs Cornwall Mountain Investments and lessee Range Resources-Appalachia, meanwhile, argued that they obtained the oil and gas rights in the 1932 tax sale.

The trustees of the Margaret O.F. Proctor Trust—and, in a separate but nearly identical challenge, the trustees of the Thomas E. Proctor Heirs Trust—argued that the state Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Butler v. Charles Powers Estate, which upheld the Dunham Rule, applied not just to private deeds but to treasurers deeds as well, meaning their oil and gas rights were not transferred to Cornwall Mountain in the 1932 tax sale. The Superior Court, however, disagreed.