BALTIMORE v. McKIM—3 BLAND. 447

the east side of Gay street, from the south side of Pratt street
into the basin, a distance of about eight hundred and sixteen feet;
with an east extension, at right angles from its south end, of about
eighty-six feet. It appears, and is admitted, that the tide-water
of the basin originally flowed a considerable distance above the
present termination of Gay street; that the patent for the tract
called Cole's Harbor, included the lands, on which this part of the
city was laid out, only to the line of the tide-water as it originally
flowed, and no further; that no patent had ever been issued for
any part of the land which was originally covered by the tide-
water of the basin; that the whole of the strip of land in ques-
tion, at one time, formed a part of the bed of this navigable basin;
that John Smith, who was the owner of a lot on Gay street ex-
tending to the tide, applied to the port wardens of Baltimore for
permission to extend his wharf into the basin, together with ten
or fifteen feet of Gay street; that, on the 20th of September, 1786,
permission was granted to extend his wharf, as prayed, until it
intersected a line drawn east from a point eighty feet south of the
south side of Conway street, and parallel thereto, together with
eleven leet of Gay street continued along the front of said wharf;
but instead of taking only eleven feet, the wharf was carried out,
as it now is, to about twenty-nine leet on Gay street; that this
strip of land had been altogether made and raised upon the bed of
the basin by John Smith and others, who completed it about the
year 1790; and it was not, in any sense, an alluvion, or attached
as such to any other fast land; that, upon ground made near and
fronting the whole of this strip of land, warehouses had been
built; and that John Smith, and those who claimed under him, for
some years, charged and received wharfage; but in the year 1803,
the city began to collect wharfage, and continued their collections
until about the year 1828.

* These claimants found their prayer for patents upon the
facts, that the State had never, at any time, either by a 455
grant from the land office, or, in any other legal manner, parted
with its right of soil, in the land in question to any one; and that
it is such a piece of grantable land for which they now may; or
any one else might have obtained a patent, according to the rules
of the land office, upon payment of the composition money.

On the other hand the caveators contend, that no patents can
be allowed to issue; because the strip of land in question was a
public wharf on which they, during many years, bad charged and
collected wharfage; and the right of soil in all such wharves had
been virtually vested in them by the Act which gives them the
right to charge and collect wharfage; 1827, ch. 162; since to give
all the uses of land is, iu effect, to give the Jaud itself. And also
because, even supposing no right had been vested in them by that
Act of Assembly; yet it was sufficient to prevent the issuing of a