DAVENPORT, N.Y. – Three years ago, Anne and Bob Stack moved from Nevada to the hills of central New York. They planned to build their retirement home on a lot next to Anne’s brother’s house, and were working with a local builder whose eco-friendly homes they had been reading about for years.

But days after reaching New York, the Stacks received a letter of behalf of Oklahoma-based energy giant Williams Companies, Inc. saying that the company was planning to build a pipeline that would run 75 feet from their future home – and that they would need about three acres of the Stacks' land for construction.

What's more, there was nothing the Stacks could do about it.

“You get it on the computer and there it is,” said Anne Stack, referring to the court notice giving their land to Williams. “They win. We lose ... It feels surreal.”

With all the natural gas being produced in the U.S. through hydraulic fracturing, energy companies have been building pipelines at a fever pitch. More than 100,000 miles of gas pipelines have been built in America since 2002. Often, the land companies need to build pipelines is in private hands, so it has become commonplace to take land over the objections of landowners. The practice is allowed under a little-known federal law from the 1930s, which gives private pipeline companies the right of eminent domain.

Williams, which delivers almost one-third of the natural gas used in the U.S., has been using eminent domain to take land in villages, farmlands and forests of northeastern Pennsylvania and central New York to build the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline. The 30-inch, high-pressure natural gas pipeline will cross nearly 300 rivers and streams, and require cutting down hundreds of thousands of trees, leaving behind a clear cut in places nearly half a football field wide. More than 100 landowners have had property taken against their will to build Constitution – and none of them are happy.

“People think that they own their land and that they have the right to their land, but in fact, the government owns all the land,” said Anne Marie Garti, a founding member and counsel for the group Stop The Pipeline. “When the government needs your land, it has the right to take that land."

Eminent domain, which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, allows the federal government to take private land for public use with fair compensation. But what's happening with the pipeline is different, and far more outrageous to residents, Garti says.

It's giving that right to a private corporation.