Camp Menotomy’s 1961 Deed Ties Any Sale to Finding No Camp. The Trustees’ Own Court Filing Describes Two Offers From One.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

An $18 million contract for 95 acres on Lake Winnipesaukee turns on one clause written in December 1961. A Massachusetts judge allowed the sale in September 2026. An appeal followed, and New Hampshire’s attorney general was reported in November 2026 to be investigating.

On Dec. 6, 1961, Arlington Girl Scouts Inc. of Arlington, Massachusetts, deeded three tracts of land in Meredith to five trustees for one dollar and other consideration. The largest tract ran along Lake Winnipesaukee for about a mile. The same day the five trustees signed a declaration, set down in the same instrument, that spelled out what they could and could not do with the land. Its last line gave the arrangement a name: the Camp Menotomy Trust. The recorded copy shows it was received at the registry on Jan. 3, 1962.

That four-page instrument sits under an $18 million purchase and sale agreement. The current trustees signed the agreement on Feb. 10, 2024, with a company called Menotomy Development LLC, according to a memorandum their lawyers filed in the Middlesex Probate and Family Court in Massachusetts on Oct. 14, 2025. YourArlington, a news site in Arlington, Massachusetts, reported that Judge Carla A. Salvucci issued a decree on Sept. 2, 2026, allowing the sale, and that objectors filed an appeal on Sept. 14, 2026.

New Hampshire entered the story in November 2026. New Hampshire Public Radio reported on Nov. 13, 2026, that the Attorney General’s office is investigating, and that Attorney General John Formella said on Nov. 11, 2026, that he expects the trustees and the developer to hold off on the sale until that review is done.

Both documents are posted online. This article sets the deed beside the trustees’ own six-page court memorandum, because the dispute lives in the gap between them.

What the deed says

The declaration of trust has 11 numbered paragraphs. The first tells the trustees to maintain the property as a camp for girls ages seven to eighteen. The third tells them to rent it to the Arlington Girl Scouts at a rental the trustees think proper. The ninth fixes the number of trustees at five.

Two paragraphs deal with the day the Girl Scouts leave. Paragraph 6 says that if neither the Arlington Girl Scouts nor a like organization wants the site as a camp for girls, the trustees, in their sole discretion, may rent it to any person or group that wants to use it as a camping place. Rent beyond what upkeep requires goes into a fund for campership grants.

Paragraph 10 is the only sale clause. It sets two conditions. First, no Arlington Girl Scout organization or successor wants to hire the grounds for camping. Second, in the deed’s words, “if no other organization can be found to utilize the site for camping purposes.” If both are met, the trustees may sell by unanimous consent, at a price and on terms that seem proper to them.

Paragraph 11 says where the money goes after a sale. The trustees must invest the proceeds in investments lawful for Massachusetts fiduciaries and spend the income on camperships or scholarships for girls of Arlington.

The deed contains no conservation restriction and no requirement that a buyer keep a camp. It does not say what counts as an organization, how hard the trustees must look for one, or whether a camp that offers a low rent has been “found.”

What the trustees told the court

The trustees’ memorandum fills in the years between. In 1966, it says, the trust leased the property to the Mistick Side Girl Scout Council, successor to the Arlington group, for $1 a year for 100 years. The tenant paid taxes, utilities and upkeep and could end the lease on 30 days’ notice. Successor councils ran the camp after that, ending with the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts.

On May 9, 2023, the memorandum says, that council told the trustees the camp was no longer economically feasible to run and that it wished to end the lease.

The trustees say they then weighed renting to another nonprofit and hired two professionals to judge whether that could work. One was Jeremy Martin of Lakes Region Design Group LLC, who estimated it would cost $8,535,000 to bring the camp’s facilities level with competing camps. The other was an appraiser who compared the property with six recent sales of New Hampshire camps and noted that the others had cabins and dining halls where Menotomy had tents.

A local real estate agent brought offers of $18 million to $25 million, the filing says. The trustees calculated that a sale at fair market value, invested at a return of four to five percent, would produce about $800,000 a year for the beneficiary. They chose an offer with no significant conditions that also promised to leave about 30 percent of the acreage unbuilt. The memorandum asks the court to approve a sale to a developer who would build no more than ten homes.

The purchase and sale agreement carried a 60-day due diligence period that the filing says was extended multiple times. Its stated purpose included determining whether the trustees have legal authority to convey the property free of third-party claims and in compliance with Massachusetts charitable trust law. On Nov. 6, 2024, the trustees gave notice of the intended sale to the public charities division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office.

The camp that asked

Here is where the filing meets paragraph 10. During that due diligence period, the trustees write, a camp came forward.

On Feb. 13, 2025, Eric Carlson, owner of Camp Quinebarge, proposed leasing the property for 100 years at a fixed rent of $175,000 a year, with the trust still responsible for property taxes the filing puts at $150,000. The trustees obtained an appraisal that set the fair market lease rate at $300,000 a year net of operating expenses. They concluded that the offer would leave the beneficiary less than $10,000 a year.

By letter dated April 29, 2025, the trustees asked for a best offer with a shorter term, market rent, a named nonprofit tenant and a rent escalator. The reply, as the filing describes it, named a for-profit entity called Camp Abenaki Hills as tenant, on a triple net lease at $35,000 a year with an inflation adjustment, for 99 years. It promised scholarships of at least 30 percent for campers from the region and $3 million to $5 million in improvements. The trustees rejected it by letter dated June 26, 2025.

The filing also says that the leaders of five camp associations in the Northeast were told of the sale and the trust terms, and that no other camp had contacted the trustees about leasing or buying.

The people fighting the sale tell it differently, and their account comes through news reports, not through documents reviewed here. YourArlington reported that Carlson first contacted the listing agent in February 2024, a year earlier than the date in the filing. It reported that he made a further proposal on July 18, 2025, with $110,000 in annual rent, a 30-year lease and up to $600,000 a year in camperships, and that the objectors’ attorney, Adam Hamel, says that proposal was not disclosed to the probate court. The same report says a second group offered to lease the site for camping in October 2025, and that Carlson put the cost of improvements at about $1.8 million, roughly one-fifth of the estimate in the filing. The trustees’ attorney declined to comment to YourArlington on ongoing matters.

One more detail belongs on the table. The filing calls the buyer a third party unrelated to the trust. YourArlington reported that Menotomy Development is associated with Jeremy Martin of Lakes Region Design Group, the same name attached to the $8,535,000 improvement estimate the trustees cite. The filing’s phrase is unrelated to the trust, which is a narrower statement. The six pages of the memorandum do not say when the estimate was prepared or address any connection between the two; its exhibits were not reviewed. No source reviewed here alleges a conflict.

Two readings of one clause

The trustees do not argue that no camp asked. They argue that the trust exists for a beneficiary and that a camp at any price does not serve her. Their memorandum states that “the express purpose of the Trust is to benefit the Girl Scouts of Arlington.” A rent far below the appraised rate, locked in for 99 years, would in their account hand a mile of lakefront to a private operator while the girls named in the trust got next to nothing. A sale, by contrast, would fund camp for those girls elsewhere, with money left over.

The objectors, as InDepthNH and YourArlington have reported their argument, read paragraph 10 as a condition that comes first. A camp operator came forward and said it would use the site for camping. On that reading, the trustees cannot sell while a willing camp operator is available.

The deed supports pieces of both. Its preamble says the conveyance was made to create a trust for the benefit of the Girl Scouts of Arlington. Its first paragraph says the trust’s job is to keep up a camp. Paragraph 6 leaves renting to an outsider to the trustees’ sole discretion. Paragraph 10 conditions a sale on no organization being found. The 1961 drafters did not rank those sentences against each other.

A Massachusetts judge ruled for the trustees on Sept. 2, 2026, according to YourArlington’s report on the decree. Granite State Report did not locate the text of that decree and cannot say what reasoning it gives.

Where New Hampshire comes in

The trustees’ filing says the trust is administered in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and governed by Massachusetts law. Four trustees live in Arlington and one in Newburyport, it says. The land and the shoreline are in Meredith.

NHPR’s report does not say which statute the office is acting under. These two sections are the state’s general grant of authority over charitable trustees. How far a New Hampshire review reaches into a trust that a Massachusetts court has already ruled on is a question neither document answers, and this article does not try to.

The public record also holds a loose end on taxes. The trustees’ filing says the tenant covered real estate taxes under the 1966 lease and describes property taxes of $150,000 in its account of the first lease offer. GBH News reported on Aug. 18, 2026, that the Girl Scouts say they continue to pay property taxes. InDepthNH reported on April 30, 2026, that the property is assessed at about $15.3 million and has been tax-exempt through annual charitable filings. Those accounts do not match on their face. Meredith’s assessing records would show which describes the property in which years.

The scale of the plan varies by source too. The filing says no more than ten homes. YourArlington reported seven single-family homes. InDepthNH reported that current zoning would allow about 20 house lots and that the proposal is for seven.

What to watch

Three things were open as of Nov. 13, 2026, and none has a date in the documents and reports reviewed here. The objectors’ appeal of the Massachusetts decree was filed Sept. 14, 2026; the reports do not name the appellate court or a schedule. The filing described a due diligence period that had been extended multiple times as of October 2025; its status after the decree is not in the record reviewed here. And NHPR’s report gave no end date for the New Hampshire Attorney General’s review.

Four records would settle most of what is still argued in public: the text of the Sept. 2, 2026, decree; the appeal papers; whatever the Attorney General’s office concludes; and the Town of Meredith’s assessing and planning files on 386 Meredith Neck Road.

Until those records surface, the deed is the best evidence of what the people who gave the land away expected. They planned for the Girl Scouts leaving. They wrote one paragraph for renting to someone else and one for selling, and they made the sale depend on whether anyone else could be found to camp there. The filing shows a camp asking twice. Whether those offers were a finding or a formality is the question that survives the first ruling.

Fact check

Editor’s note. This article rests on two primary documents, the 1961 recorded deed and declaration of trust and the trustees’ Oct. 14, 2025, court memorandum, and on New Hampshire statutes as published by the General Court. The court ruling, the appeal, the objectors’ account and the Attorney General’s review are attributed to the news outlets named in the fact-check table. The text of the Sept. 2, 2026, decree was not located. Individual trustees are not named. Nothing here is legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.