1. The Origin Story: The Leather Boom (1890s)

In the late 1800s, north-central Pennsylvania was the heart of the American leather tanning industry. To tan leather, companies needed tree bark, meaning they had to buy up tens of thousands of acres of timberland.

Two of the biggest players in this boom were the Hoyt Brothers (Oliver, William, Mark, Edward, Theodore, and George Hoyt), Thomas E. Proctor and several other related families, including the Thornes.

In 1893, these tanning families sold their surface lands and tanneries to large consolidations like the United States Leather Company and the Union Tanning Company. However, they made a critical legal distinction in the deeds:

• The Surface Rights (trees, dirt, tanneries) were sold to the leather corporations.
• The Subsurface Rights (all the oil, gas, coal and minerals deep underground) were explicitly reserved and kept by the families.

Legally, this is known as severing the property into two completely separate pieces of real estate: the surface estate and the subsurface estate.

2. Who are the Families and What is Hoyt Royalty?

For over a century, these underground estates were handed down through generations of family heirs.

The descendants of the Hoyt brothers thus inherited their family’s subsurface tracts. However, because each individual descendent only had ownership of a small percentage of the land, they were at risk of being overrun by more powerful oil and gas companies. So in 2010, the family consolidated these scattered inheritance percentages to form Hoyt Royalty, LLC, a family-operated company to manage their mineral rights across Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier (including Sullivan, Tioga, Lycoming, Potter and McKean counties).

The families are not large corporations. They are multigenerational families representing people from all walks of life, including retirees, small business owners and veterans.

3. The Conflict: The Shale Boom and “Title Washing”

For a hundred years, these underground rights were quiet. But in the mid-2000s, modern horizontal drilling sparked the Marcellus Shale natural gas boom. Suddenly, the gas deep beneath these rural acres became worth many millions of dollars.

This wealth triggered a legal conflict between the family heirs and the current owners of the surface land (which, over the decades, had frequently been acquired by the state Game Commission or large corporate interests).

The state and corporate entities attempted to use a historical legal loophole known as “title washing.” Here’s how it worked:

1. In the early 1900s, the surface companies often neglected or purposefully failed to pay their property taxes.
2. Because the land was undeveloped, the county would put the entire property up for a public tax sale.
3. The surface owner (or their agent) would deliberately buy the land back at the tax sale. They then argued that this tax sale “washed away” the family’s underground rights, magically combining the surface and subsurface back into their own hands.

4. The Landmark Supreme Court Case (May 2025)

These families spent more than a decade litigating this dynamic in court. On May 30, 2025, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court delivered a unanimous 7-0 decision in favor of the families (Commonwealth v. Proctor).

The Supreme Court invoked the “Powell Rule” — a foundational legal principle stating that no one can profit from their own intentional wrongdoing. The justices ruled that a surface owner cannot default on their taxes, buy their own land back at a tax sale, and use that tax delinquency as a weapon to strip away and steal their neighbor’s centuries-old mineral rights.

The court definitively affirmed that the families still own their ancestral subsurface property.

5. The Current Fight: Protecting Property Rights in Harrisburg

This decision cleared the last obstacle preventing these families from responsibly developing their mineral rights, generating economic opportunity in communities across the region and revenue for the commonwealth.

But in recent days, a new threat has emerged. Special interests and powerful institutional forces are currently lobbying the legislature to slip a last-minute, retroactive law into an unrelated piece of legislation to effectively overturn the Supreme Court’s decision without any public hearing or debate.

Opponents have spread a “scare tactic” narrative claiming that the ruling will cost the state $1.3 billion in lost conservation revenue — a number that independent analysis has shown to be factually inaccurate, as it represents the state’s entire historical leasing portfolio since 2008, which is completely unaffected by this specific case.

This is a true David and Goliath scenario. If the legislature sets a precedent that it can work with corporate interests to retroactively change property laws and erase a unanimous Supreme Court ruling after the fact, then no private property rights in Pennsylvania are safe.

6. The Solution: A Ready and Responsible Partner

The families are not looking to block progress. Instead, the Supreme Court decision finally breaks a nearly 15-year logjam that has kept these resources tied up in court.

Hoyt Royalty and the other families have built a sophisticated, ready-to-launch operational framework. Moving forward, the families want to act as proactive, collaborative partners with the commonwealth and the Game Commission to responsibly develop this resource.

If this amendment is defeated, the families are prepared to immediately proceed with plans to develop their natural gas assets to quickly create local, high-paying jobs and inject substantial new revenue into the commonwealth during a critical budget shortfall, without adding a single dollar of burden to Pennsylvania taxpayers.

At the same time, the family operators are actively committing to work closely with the commonwealth and Game Commission to institute best practices for conserving and stewarding these lands.

However, if corporate special interests prevail and this amendment is passed, then we will be forced to go to court to protect our constitutional rights. This will tie up the development of these resources for years and cost the commonwealth millions of dollars in lost revenue and legal fees.

We are seeking to take advantage of this historic opportunity and deliver a win for property rights, a win for Pennsylvania’s economy and a win for responsible development of our natural resources.