In 2018, a gas pipeline company took an easement across a Virginia family's 560-acre property on Bent Mountain. After years of fighting over compensation, the family won a $523,000 jury award—but the company kept its right to use the land.

When a pipeline company condemns a strip of your land and the pipeline is already going in, what are you actually fighting for? Not the land.

By the time the Terry family walked into federal court in Roanoke, that had been decided somewhere else, and it was never going to be reopened in front of a jury. All that was left on the table was money.

That distinction is the whole story of what happened to a 560-acre tract on Bent Mountain, in Roanoke County, Virginia, land the family had held for seven generations. It helps explain how a four-day trial ended with a $523,327 verdict, and why that number then moved twice before it stuck.

We’re not lawyers, and this article is for general information only—not legal advice. It summarises a particular dispute; eminent-domain rules and compensation depend on the jurisdiction and the facts of each case. If a pipeline or other project affects your property, consult a qualified lawyer in your jurisdiction.

What actually gets taken, and why the pipeline stays

An easement is not the same as buying land outright. Mountain Valley Pipeline took permanent and temporary easements totaling about 8.37 acres across the 560-acre tract, plus a wide strip to lay and maintain the line. The family still owns the ground. What they lost was the right to control that corridor, and, in the family’s telling, some of the value of everything around it.

The power to do this comes from the Natural Gas Act, which lets an approved interstate pipeline use federal eminent domain. An explainer from the University of Maryland’s Agriculture Law Education Initiative lays out the two things a landowner can contest: whether the taking is really for a public use, and how much they are owed. The Terrys had lost the first fight before this trial began. The pipeline already had its public-use certificate, so the corridor was staying no matter what a jury decided. Only the second question, the amount, was live.

That is the constitutional floor the whole dispute sits on. The Fifth Amendment protection against taking private property without just compensation, the Supreme Court held in Armstrong v. United States, “was designed to bar the Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.” The land goes to a public purpose. The public, through the taker, pays what it’s worth. Deciding that last figure was the entire job of the court.

Why it came down to two appraisers

When the only question is money, an eminent domain trial tends to collapse into a contest between valuation experts. In this case, these were not slightly apart. They were looking at the same land and describing two different properties.

The family’s appraiser valued the whole tract at $1.9 million, resting that figure in part on the land’s potential use as a commercial wind farm. From there the family asked the jury for $570,000, roughly a 30% loss in value.

Mountain Valley’s appraiser, Joseph Thompson, put the property at about $1.2 million before the taking and figured the damage at a much smaller reduction. At trial, the company’s attorneys argued the Terrys were owed about $153,000.

Back in 2018, Mountain Valley’s original offer for the roughly eight-acre easement was about $119,000. The family refused, the company condemned the corridor and began cutting trees, and four years later a jury was asked to sort out the gap between the company’s figure and the family’s.

How a jury lands on $523,000

The verdict, $523,327, sat much closer to the family’s number than the company’s. Juries in these cases don’t have to pick one appraiser’s total and adopt it whole. They weigh what they find believable from each side and can settle on a figure neither party explicitly proposed. That flexibility is exactly what turned into the next fight.

After the verdict came in, the judge decided the jury had gone too far. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Dillon set the $523,327 aside, finding it ran against the clear weight of the evidence. In her 2023 opinion, she concluded the award was more than twice the highest loss in value anyone had presented, and she entered a reduced judgment of $261,033 instead.

Why the final figure moved twice

The number the jury spoke was not, for a while, the number that counted. The family appealed, and in May 2024 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the district court and ordered the full $523,327 verdict reinstated. The panel held the award fell within the range of testimony the jury was allowed to believe, and that the property’s residential values alone could support it.

Three numbers, then, for one strip of ground: the pipeline comapany’s $153,000, the judge’s $261,033, and the jury’s  $523,327. The verdict survived, but only after a second round of litigation over whether the jurors had been allowed to reach it.

What strikes us, reading the case from start to finish, is how narrow the argument always was. Four days of trial, dueling appraisers, a $1.9 million valuation against a $1.2 million one, a wind farm that will never be built, and two more years of appeals, all of it about one thing: the size of a check.

The corridor was cut, the trees were down, and the pipeline was going where the pipeline was going. The only thing anyone could still win was a number, and the number was never going to buy the land back.