About NMH Northfield

NMH expects 2-3 offers for campus

June 16, 2006
By JANET BOND, The Recorder

NORTHFIELD — Northfield Mount Hermon School is expecting two or three formal offers this summer for its former Northfield campus.

Town officials received that news this week from Carol Lebo, NMH director of Northfield Campus Initiative.

Lebo was attending a meeting of the town’s Northfield Transition Committee, which has agreed to plans that could lead to a town request for 117 acres of the land owned by the private school, land valuable for what it holds of the town’s earliest history.

NMH abandoned the Northfield campus last year in favor of its Gill campus as it consolidated what had begun as two schools, and in recent decades had been a single, two-campus co-ed prep school.

It has been trying to find a buyer for the Northfield school property, while the town has explored buying some of the undeveloped land NMH owns in Northfield.

The town’s Transition Committee listened to a presentation by its members and consultants from Legacy Partners for land to the east and west of Main Street along the Mill River.

Some of it was land originally bought by English settlers from the few Coassock Indians that survived a war with the Mohawk Indians. Some was land on which Francis Schell built his Chateau and the Northfield Hotel once catered to a fancy summer crowd.

The land is valuable for its natural charms — hayfields that give an open view of the surrounding hills, the wildlife that thrives along the field’s edges and in the woodlands that have replaced the Chateau and the Hotel over the last 40 years.

The Mill River, with its cascades, powered enough industry that Northfield could be self-sustaining with grist and saw mills along the river and several factories.

The land offers recreation value in the hiking trails students and faculty from NMH blazed in the 23-acre Mill River parcel. There is an established snowmobile trail and there are opportunities for cross country skiing in the area.

“It could be Northfield’s version of Central Park on Main Street,” said Selectman and committee member John Spanbauer.

But, the subcommittee that made the presentation has some serious work to do before it can sell the selectmen on the idea.

Spanbauer, speaking as a selectman, told the subcommittee it would have to figure out “how it’s going to affect the tax rate.”

NMH Headmaster Thomas Sturtevant made a similar point when he complimented the presentation, but before the proposal reached the school, the subcommittee needed to “make sure it would be stewarded properly.”

The subcommittee will continue working with Legacy Partners on its proposal, this time focusing on what the costs to maintain the property will be and what kind of grant money might be available to pay those costs.

Both Sturtevant and Lebo asked that the committee develop a complete and prioritized list of what it would like from the school before it makes a presentation to members of the school’s board of trustees in the fall.

The next stop for the subcommittee will be the town’s newly formed Open Space Committee and the Finance Committee, a meeting being planned for sometime in August.

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