Brewster Academy land donor says land can still benefit Alton

The man who’s donated a $6.3-million piece of local real estate to Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro says he’s not aware of any attempt by Alton town leaders to secure the land for a town beach.

But he said the private college preparatory school’s plans for the land can still be a benefit to the community — and that’s something he wants, since Alton has been his family’s summer home for about 20 years.

“We have a wonderful spot right around the corner,” said former Fidelity Investments President James C. Curvey, referring to his home near the 11.3-acres his family gave to Brewster late last year.

The land, known as the former Brook and Bridle bed-and-breakfast, is off Robert’s Cove Road.

Brewster’s announcement of the donation came after several months of negotiations, Curvey explained yesterday.

One thing he wanted was to make sure the land’s value would be used to make scholarships available for local young people to attend Brewster.

“I’ve always been very interested in education,” he said. “And with Brewster Academy I wanted there to be the scholarships for local kids, those who couldn’t otherwise afford to go to Brewster. So they would have that sort of chance.

“Hopefully in four years there will be 12 young people there who would not otherwise be able to go to a place like Brewster,” he added.

As explained by Marsha Eldridge of the school, Curvey’s donation will added to the school’s total investments to create a total of 12 annual scholarships for “day students,” valued at about $24,450 annually. The first three will be awarded in 2009-10 with three more each subsequent year. (There are 360 students at the school, including 80 “day students” that do not live on the Wolfeboro campus.)

Curvey said he got the idea of creating scholarships for needy students when he first donated money to his college alma mater, Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia. In 2002 he created a $1-million endowed scholarship fund there to allow students from his former high school, Mahanoy Area High School in Schuylkill County, Penn., to attend the prestigious school. Three years later he founded another $6-million endowment to allow other students from the Pennsylvania coal mining area where he grew up to go to Villanova.

“They wanted to name a building after me,” Curvey said, when he first approached the university about making a donation. “I didn’t want that. I’d like to be involved rather than just giving money away.”

Curvey said he meets with all the students who attend Villanova on the scholarship fund he established and he hopes to do the same with the local students who attend Brewster.

Curvey said he originally bought the Robert’s Cove land — which he called “spectacular” — to serve as a kind of family vacation compound. But when those plans didn’t work out he began thinking about what to do with it. Although he had no previous relationship with Brewster, he ended up giving the school the largest donation it ever received.

And in some ways that disappointed Ruth Arsenault, who was chairman of the Selectboard’s Alton Beach Committee two years ago.

She said her group had learned of Curvey’s plans to divest himself of the land in 2007 and spoke with a local realtor who told her that Curvey was willing to work with the town on timing if it wanted to buy the land for about $3-million for a town beach, park and picnicking site. However the group never got the support of the Selectboard and the project didn’t move pass a petition being passed around town for a few days. Last year the beach committee officially disbanded.

Curvey said he never had any communications about the land with anyone from Alton and thought the newspaper stories that appeared in 2007 were “made up out of whole cloth.”

Meanwhile, Eldridge says the school is not planning on any new construction on what’s being referred to as Brewster’s new “satellite campus” in Alton. “We’re going to use the existing structures, seven cottages of varying sizes,” she said. “We just plan to use the cottages that are there for some student and faculty dormitories, mostly in the summer. Or in the fall when we have our leadership training program of about 30 kids that last two night and three days. We might put up some leadership-building structures on the property like rope courses or a climbing wall.”

According to a story published in the weekly Baysider newspaper yesterday, some of the building space may also be used for a classroom/science laboratory.

But school officials are not planning on allowing residents to use the 200-foot beach, the news story read. When Mike Cooper, Brewster’s Head of School, was asked at a Planning Board meeting if that might occur sometime in the future he reportedly replied, “Probably not.”

But Curvey maintains the school’s plans for his former land, which include education related to environmental protection and leadership, could still be a significant benefit to his part-time hometown.

“I think it’s going to be a real coup for Alton,” he said. “Brewster is really looking at this thing, this green movement and ecology thing, and that could be a magnet for some interesting things to go on in the town of Alton. I saw Alton as getting a wonderful facility and wonderful people like those at Brewster Academy involved with the town that normally wouldn’t be.”