Mechanic Liens
Mechanic Liens
Mechanic (N.): a person who earned his living from the products he produced with his hands. Carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, furniture makers, and wheelwrights, for example, were "mechanics" in parlance of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Mechanic Liens
Mechanic liens are a very important archival record type that is little used. They can provide information about many thousands of old buildings that is hard to find elsewhere. A lien is a claim for unpaid monies against a piece of property. A mechanic lien is a claim for unpaid monies due to construction work. Mechanic liens provide a brief description of the constructed building, together with the name of the owner of the property and the identity of the property (legally known as the curtilage) to which the claim is attached, and the amount of money at issue.
They reveal when that construction took place, because they could only be filed within a fixed time period after the work was completed.
They can provide much more. If a mechanic lien was filed by the contractor, it would yield his name. If the building was designed by an architect, it would yield the architect’s name along with that of the owner (“… built according to the plans and specifications of …”). But others could and did file mechanic liens. If one were filed by a sub-contractor, it would reveal the owner’s name and that of the general contractor. If filed by a supplier, it would reveal the contractor or sub-contractor for whom material was being supplied. If by a workman, it would reveal the contractor or sub-contractor for whom the employee worked. Used comparatively, and in conjunction with city directories, mechanic liens can sometimes reveal nearly the entire team behind a building’s construction.
Mechanic liens have also been around for a long time. Maryland was the first state to enact a mechanic lien law, in 1791. By the third quarter of the 19th century, most states had enacted mechanic lien laws.
A Caveat!
Mechanic liens probably are not considered permanent records in some states. Many jurisdictions may have destroyed them. Researchers should place a priority on finding the holdings of mechanic liens in the counties in which they conduct research. Let the custodians of these records know that they are important to you.
Not all states recorded their mechanic liens in the same manner. In some states, mechanic liens may have been lumped together with other recorded liens (federal liens, tax liens, judgment liens, etc.). By contrast, in some Michigan counties mechanic liens were recorded in the books of mortgages, and were not separately indexed. This tends to increase their invisibility as a record type and make it even less likely that researchers will appreciate the numbers of such documents that were filed or their importance when examined collectively. It does have at least one upside, however: since mortgages, themselves, are often treated as permanent records, mechanic liens would also be, by default.
In one recent sampling of 100 consecutive pages of mortgages in that Michigan county, I discovered two mechanic liens. If that proportion holds as an average, it means that hundreds of mechanic liens were filed in that county between the 1870s and 1920. Of the two liens, one was filed by a builder and it identifies the client for whom he was constructing a house; the other was filed by a merchant who supplied paint for the painting of a new building, This shows that in that state, the mechanic lien laws applied both to contractors and to material suppliers.
https://www.nj.gov/dep/hpo/4sustain/cont_lien_07.pdf