LAKE PLEASANT — Members representing entwined sacred and secular roots of the youngest and smallest of Montague’s five villages will gather Sunday, Sept. 25, at 10:30 a.m. at Tabor Thompson Memorial Temple to celebrate incorporation birthdays: the 47th for the Lake Pleasant Village Association and the 109th for The National Spiritual Alliance.
The village was founded in 1874 and, according to the U.S. census, had 124 residents in 2020. Thompson Temple is located at 2 Montague Ave., across from the Post Office.
A stroke of coincidental good fortune led to the joint celebration when a longtime member of both organizations realized earlier this month that the state had approved the Lake Pleasant Village Association’s incorporation on Sept. 11, 1975, and The National Spiritual Alliance’s incorporation on Sept. 12, 1913.
The celebration will include a brief overview of how and why each organization came to exist, a short reprise of a recent Sunday service focusing on humorous bloopers as a result of imprecise language, slicing of pizza and cutting of a birthday cake, and a presentation of a Lake Pleasant Village Association slideshow.
Also, Totty Linscott of Massasoit Street, the lone surviving member of the village association’s original board of directors, will be honored.
In the spring of 1974, the village association took loose form as a civic, cultural, economic, philosophical and political group after 32 residents attended an exploratory meeting and committed themselves to improving Lake Pleasant. Notification of official incorporation approval came a year later.
“We, the residents,” the preamble to the Lake Pleasant Village Association Constitution begins, “being aware of the erosion of morals inherent in the anonymity of urban life, and esteeming greatly the traditions and values of village life, join together in order to perpetuate those traditions and values and to keep the village of Lake Pleasant an island of simple neighborly duties and pleasures. We are, at the same time, resolved that this village shall not become a mere anachronism, but shall be a living, vital community.”
In the early months of 1913, 23 petitioners — bookended by the Rev. G. Tabor Thompson and his wife, Almira E. Wheeler Thompson, Spiritualists who believed reincarnation was necessary for the progression of mortal souls to merge with the creative force of all and everything — split from the New England Spiritualist Campmeeting Association that had been based in the village since the mid-1870s.
The National Spiritual Alliance’s mission statement “is to provide a diverse, open and affirming organization of individuals, ministers, churches, societies, spiritual healing and mediumship development centers and schools for the practice and promotion of the religion, philosophy and science of Spiritualism.”