Belchertown, MA - In 1972, carpenter, farmer, poet and political activist Eric L. Walgren, known at the time as “Eric the Rat,” transferred ownership of his house at 140 Gulf Road here to the Universal Life Church of Belchertown, a pagan church he had founded two years earlier.

Religion or tax dodge? 

The question has been raised several times since the 1970s and, now, more than eight years after Walgren’s death, is being discussed again in the wake of the building having burned down on Feb. 1.In a tale almost as offbeat as the man himself, Walgren’s daughter, Evan D. Walgren, 44, of South Carolina, was charged with setting the fire. She has pleaded innocent and is being held pending trial without right to bail after a judge in Eastern Hampshire District Court determined her to be dangerous.

The fire came a day after Evan Walgren was arrested for throwing boulders through the doors of the home, bursting in and attempting to assault one of the residents. The two men who lived in the house, Alan Dean, 26, and Robert St. Cyr, 44, lost all their belongings in the subsequent fire and are staying with friends.

The question of whether the house should be viewed as a church emerged in the 1970s in Town Hall, where Walgren’s attempts for tax-exempt status for the property ultimately failed.

After Walgren died of cancer in a nursing home in 1998, at the age of 59, the question wound up in court when his daughter filed a lawsuit on behalf of her brother, Sean L. Walgren, and herself, trying to take possession of the home from what by then was called the Nature Church.

Deciding that case in 2003, Judge Geoffrey A. Wilson ruled in Hampshire Probate and Family Court that even though church participation fell off over the years and the church was very loosely organized, the religious corporation Eric Walgren founded continued to exist and “the property remains in the church.”

Court documents show that Eric Walgren bought the property in 1961, built the house and lived there for a time with his wife.

Originally from upstate New York, he came to Western Massachusetts to attend Amherst College in the early 1960s. After graduating from Amherst, Walgren went on to earn a law degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey and returned here to enroll in a graduate program in fine arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1969.

While at UMass, Walgren took a leadership role in 1970 campus demonstrations and was on the steering committee for a campuswide student strike in May of that year to protest against the Vietnam War and the killings at Kent State University. He took credit for organizing an impromptu nude-in at the campus pond that spring during parents weekend.

In 1973, Walgren sued the Amherst selectmen and represented himself in federal court over the issue of scheduling a town election while college students were away.

Walgren was an unsuccessful candidate for selectman in the 1973 election, and he alleged that the election’s timing - with many students out of town - hurt his chances and denied the students their right to vote.

The legality of the election was upheld in August 1975 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. While Walgren ultimately lost the court case, the Amherst selectmen did agree that they would schedule future town elections at times when dormitories were open and most students at UMass, Amherst and Hampshire colleges were living in town.

Two decades later, when that issue came up again in the 1990s, Walgren spoke at a public meeting for 10 minutes, quoting from the federal decisions in his court case.

In an interview with The Republican in 1996, Walgren said he still referred to himself as a hippie and thought social climbing was a vice.

He transferred the property to his brother, Douglas, in 1963, and Douglas Walgren then transferred it back to Eric, by then divorced, in December 1968.

It was in January 1969, while he was a UMass graduate student, that the town of Belchertown started proceedings to take the property, because property taxes were not paid in 1967.

On Sept. 23, 1970, Walgren formed a branch of the Universal Life Church, using the Gulf Road property as its address. The church, the Universal Life Church of Belchertown, was organized as a religious corporation under state laws.

In November 1971, the town went to Land Court with a foreclosure petition, and, in November 1972, Walgren conveyed the property to his church. The deed included the language, “I, Eric Walgren, Reverend … grant to the Universal Life Church of Belchertown Inc., for its life with a reverter to me.”

A notation on the deed at the time of this transfer referred to the property being subject to a tax title held by the town.

On April 26, 1977, Walgren signed a change of name certificate filed with the state, renaming it the Nature Church. He described it as a church practicing latter-day paganism.In a description of the church in the 1970s, Walgren wrote, “We are finding our spiritual place - away from Modern Society - within the Order of Nature. Our primary deities are Sun, Moon and Earth. No authoritative gurus, no robot-brained gods.”

The statement continued, “If atheism unsettles your soul and Nature draws you, welcome to our process of religion-building.”

There were 12 annual holidays, and the leaders of the church pronounced that they were legally chartered to marry people and have funeral services.

In its earliest years, the church attracted as many as 50 participants, according to court documents, but the numbers dropped off substantially by the end of the 1970s.

In December 1977, the town refused to grant the Nature Church’s application for a religious exemption from paying property taxes. This ruling was upheld in 1981 by the state Supreme Judicial Court.

In July 1978, Walgren and Jean Murray, who was listed as church treasurer, formed the Country Land Trust, with themselves as trustees, and placed a conservation restriction on the deed. Then, in November 1983, the outstanding taxes were paid, and the property was redeemed from the foreclosure proceedings.

According to the court documents and to longtime acquaintances, Eric Walgren lived at the house from 1972 until his death.

A few weeks after Walgren died, five members of the church gathered on Sept. 16, 1998, at a meeting and elected as new president Christopher Zentgraf. Zentgraf, who died last year, was an early member of the church who had lived at 140 Gulf Road at various times.

Then on Dec. 11, 1998, Evan Walgren filed her lawsuit.

In his April 2, 2003, ruling in favor of the church, Judge Wilson wrote, “Having started with a very small membership, and largely unarticulated ‘pagan’ beliefs, there is no minimum number who must take solace from the church’s existence, or agree as to what it stands for, in order for it to have endured.”

Robert D. Jackson, of Amherst, 60, a carpenter who met Walgren in 1969 when they were both involved with protesting the Vietnam War, said he has an open mind and, in the days since the fire, has been talking with old acquaintances, learning new details about Walgren, the house and the church.

“Eric ordained me into the Universal Life Church. Everybody gets ordained as a minister. If you are brought into the church, you are a minister and you are ordained,” Jackson said.

“It was sort of a loosey-goosey thing if you will,” Jackson recalls. “At the same time, the people who were in it loved to talk about religion.”

Jackson said he is still a member of the church and supports the goal of raising money to rebuild. But he said he also has an open mind about the legal claims of both the church and the Walgren family regarding the property on Gulf Road and would like to see the church raise money for Evan Walgren’s legal battle.

Richard E. Newman, 55, of Amherst, is another longtime member of the church, and he testified on its behalf during the lawsuit.

In a recent interview, Newman said, “The problem with the tax dodge argument was that long after the tax cases stopped, the church continued. The taxes were paid. We continued to have rituals.”

Newman said that even though participation at Walgren’s holiday ceremonies fell off by the end of the 1970s, there were holiday gatherings, typically with half a dozen people, particularly for Halloween.

“It wouldn’t be that different from a Halloween party, but we would relate back to the origins,” Newman said.

Deborah Moore-Gilmore, 54, of Palmer, said she lived with Walgren as his domestic partner for most of the last five years of his life.

“The church was totally inactive at that point. It was Eric and myself, alone. Occasionally we would have a dinner party, or we would invite a few people over for the sauna,” Moore-Gilmore said.

Source

• Appleton, John. Disputed church back in spotlight. (2007, February 18). The Republican, MA. Retrieved February 18, 2007

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Legal Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.