Tim Ryan, tryan@shawanoleader.com
Two daughters from a previous marriage of Secretary of State John Kerry, and two of their uncles, are among 11 people the city has identified as heirs to the Smalley Park property in Shawano.
The site became home to Shawano Medical Center in 1931, in spite of a deed restriction saying the property had to be used as a park.
With SMC planning to relocate, city officials engaged the law firm of Davis and Kuelthau in December 2012 to track down the heirs and get their approval to strike the park restriction from the original deed.
According to the deed restriction, the property reverts back to the heirs if it is used for anything other than a park.
Officials have no explanation for why a hospital was allowed to locate on the property, and there is nothing in the record that shows the deed restriction was ever waived.
City officials recently entered into an agreement with ThedaCare to market the property for development, but that agreement is contingent on obtaining clear title to the property.
Susan Smalley donated the roughly three-acre park property to the city in 1901, according to a news article in the April 30, 1931, edition of the Shawano County Journal about plans for a hospital on the site.
SMC purchased additional land for expansion over the years, and the hospital campus now occupies about 10 acres. The deed restriction applies only to the original three.
The finalized list of heirs includes no direct blood relatives of Susan Smalley, who died in New Jersey in 1909, according to a genealogy chart provided to the city by Davis and Kuelthau.
Instead, the heirs are the descendants of the second marriage of Georgianna Hoadley, of New York, who was previously married to Susan’s son, William. The park property was part of a marital settlement when the first marriage ended.
One of Hoadley’s great-grandchildren was Julia Thorne, who married John Kerry in 1970. They divorced in 1988.
Julia Thorne died in 2006, passing along the park property — or at least claim to a share of it — to her two children with Kerry, Alexandra and Vanessa.
Julia Thorne’s brothers — David Hoadley Thorne and Landon Ketchum Thorne III — are also among the heirs, along with Thorne’s second husband, Richard Charlesworth, and four descendants of another of Hoadley’s daughters.
The city received confirmation last week that all of those heirs have been contacted.
Another two heirs have also been identified, but have not yet been contacted.
An ex-wife of one of Hoadley’s descendants bequeathed her claim to the park to her sister and it was subsequently inherited by the sister’s children, City Administrator Brian Knapp said.
“That one’s really a stretch, but they’re still heirs because there was no probate to tell us otherwise,” he said.
In theory, all of the 11 heirs would all have an equal share of the park property, or whatever value it might have, which would be distributed equally, Knapp said.
“We would hope they would see the value of just extending the gift or extending the contribution to the community,” he said.
The city does not yet have a total cost for the work done by Davis and Kuelthau.
Clerk-Treasurer Karla Duchac said the city has not yet been billed for the majority of the law firm’s work, but she expects those bills to arrive within the next month.
The agreement approved by the Common Council called for the city to pay Davis and Kuelthau $245 an hour, plus whatever expenses the law firm incurs. The agreement included the likelihood that the law firm would have to engage other parties, including an attorney specializing in property and business law, at a rate of $265 an hour, and an estate planner, also at a rate of $265 an hour.
Should this turn into a court fight for some reason, the firm anticipates referring the case to another attorney at a rate of $300 an hour, according to the agreement.
There would be an additional cost for office paralegals, according to the agreement, at a cost ranging from $130 to $160 per hour.