The Land Is Lost, but Not the Tax Bill

Shortly before Victor Nascimento bought 11-plus acres of land in 1970, he toured the wooded site, which a real estate agent said ran along the town’s Blue Dot Trail, past Babbling Brook, and stopped at the old oak tree just over the Connecticut border.

But the tree has rotted and the brook has dried, Nascimento says, and he’s baffled because he has been paying taxes on land he can’t find.

“You walk in the woods,” he says, “and all the trees look the same.”

Nascimento and his brother, who is now dead, bought the parcel for $2,100 and got a quit-claim deed, which gives them the right to claim the land but not to take any recourse against the seller should there be a problem with the title.

Nascimento and his wife, Lynn, of East Providence, and his sister-in-law, Lois, were so confused that they refused to pay taxes on the land for two years.

When the town threatened to sell the land to collect the back taxes in December, the Nascimentos paid the $455 tax bill. Nascimento said he would get a title search, although financial constraints won’t allow that soon.

Old Dream

“I am an old Boy Scout, and it was my dream to own a piece of land,” Nascimento says.

Arlene Violet, former state attorney general, says if they had gotten a title search and title insurance when they bought the land, they would be able to sue the title company if they could not find their property.

Violet says there are two recourses: Since the old oak tree, Blue Dot Trail and Babbling Brook are identified in the Nascimentos’ quit-claim deed, they could look for other references to those landmarks, perhaps in older deeds, to try to claim ownership. Also, they could obtain topography maps, which are close-ups of the land, to find their parcel.

The tax collector agrees with the Nascimentos that the land exists. “There’s a deed for it, so we’re assuming that it exists,” says Linda Czerkiewicz of Hopkinton. “They bought something.”

Nascimento says the original documents filed with his lawyer were destroyed when the lawyer’s garage burned years ago, and his real estate agent says he doesn’t remember the Nascimentos.

“There’s a chain of taxes people paid on this land, dating back to the 1800s,” Nascimento says.

He says he bought the land from a Dean Edwards, who inherited the parcel from his father, Oliver Edwards. He says Dean Edwards died about two years ago.

“Oliver Edwards was an old-time Yankee,” Nascimento says. “These Yankees don’t pay taxes on land that doesn’t exist.”

Not only does he not know where his property is, he doesn’t know how much it is worth.

“I believe it’s quite expensive,” he says, “let’s put it that way.”