Building Contracts

In the 19th century, as buildings increasingly came to be built according to the provisions of written contracts, it became a practice (in New Jersey and some other states) for building owners or contractors to file a copy of the building contract with the county clerk or other appropriate local authority.

Boston, Mass., for example, began to file building contracts as early as 1820. This practice was related to the filing of mechanic liens —the laws regarding which, in NJ at least, required that if a lien were filed for a building that was constructed under the terms of a contract, then a copy of the contract also needed to be filed or the lien would be invalid.

Filed building contracts—which commonly included general specifications and occasionally included building plans— were also sometimes filed with the construction specifications, usually the only place where they might still be found.

Collections of filed building contracts took up a great deal of space, and many jurisdictions may have destroyed their old building contracts.

In New Jersey, for example, collections of old building contracts exist for only seven of twenty-one counties, and only one resides today with the county clerk’s office in which the contracts were filed. The others mostly reside with historical societies—one of which survives only because the society’s officials pulled it out of the dumpster into which the county had thrown it.