A 95-acre stretch of undeveloped shoreline on Lake Winnipesaukee, once alive with swimming, hiking, and tie-dying for generations of Girl Scouts, now sits at the center of a bitter legal fight over whether it becomes seven luxury homes or remains a camp for girls. The property, known since 1939 as Camp Menotomy, closed in 2023 after Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts declined to renew its lease, and trustees who control the land have since accepted an $18 million offer from a real estate developer — a deal now being weighed by a Massachusetts probate court.
According to The Boston Globe, the camp sits along Lake Winnipesaukee near the White Mountains and has been used over the decades by Girl Scouts from Arlington, Massachusetts, across the state, and in New Hampshire for mother-daughter and father-daughter family weekends. The Arlington Girl Scouts signed the property over to a trust in 1962 under a deed that limits its use to benefiting girls from Arlington specifically, while allowing the trust to lease it, sell it, or reinvest its value elsewhere — but only if no other organization can be found willing to use the site for camping. That single clause is now the crux of the entire dispute.
Trustees told the Globe that Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts informed them in 2023 that continuing to lease the land — for just $1 a year — was no longer economically feasible. Jeremy Martin, who represents developer Lakes Region Design Group, offered $18 million for the property in 2024, and trustees accepted. Martin's company plans to build seven single-family homes on the site while preserving 30 percent of the property as a nature preserve with hiking trails, the Globe reports. Trustees argue that selling the land and redirecting the proceeds to support Arlington girls at other Girl Scout camps would still fulfill the deed's original purpose, and say investment income from a sale could cover the cost of those campers attending elsewhere at no charge, according to a legal petition cited by the Globe.
A Rival Camp Operator Steps In With a Counteroffer
Opponents insist the trustees never seriously tested the market for a camp operator before agreeing to sell. Eric Carlson, who runs Camp Quinebarge — a for-profit summer camp in New Hampshire's Lakes Region now in its 90th year — offered to lease Camp Menotomy for $110,000 a year and pledged to invest between $3 million and $5 million into the property, per the Globe. Carlson's proposal, detailed further by the Laconia Daily Sun, spelled out a 30-year triple net lease in which he would cover all property taxes and provide up to $600,000 in annual scholarships for Arlington girls, prioritizing Arlington residents, while operating the camp as a nonprofit.
Trustees rejected Carlson's bid, telling the Globe it fell below fair market value. Carlson and his lawyer allege the trustees never properly considered the offer and argue the deed requires the land to remain a camp unless doing so is truly impossible. The Laconia Daily Sun's earlier reporting adds another wrinkle: the trust listed the 95-acre parcel for $20 million on February 9, 2024, and accepted the $18 million contingent offer from Lakes Region Design Group just one day later, planning a gated subdivision called The Preserve at Whispering Pines. Opponents argue that one-day window gave no other camp operator a real chance to bid.
Neighbors and Camp Leaders Rally Against the Deal
Bette Higley, a neighbor who opposes selling the camp to a developer, told the Globe the loss would leave kids without the kind of outdoor space Camp Menotomy once provided, calling it a lost habitat for kids. Gretchen Seifert, camp director at Camp Nokomis — a YMCA girls program on Bear Island — also opposes converting the site into private homes. Locally, the Meredith Neck and Islands Alliance has retained legal counsel at McLane Middleton to file formal objections with charitable trust regulators in both states, arguing per InDepthNH that the 1962 deed mandates preserving the land for camping whenever a viable operator exists.
New Hampshire Executive Councilor Joe Kenney has also come out in support of keeping Camp Menotomy as a camp, per the Globe. On the other side, the Massachusetts Attorney General's public charity division has backed the trustees' position that the sale can proceed. Massachusetts Middlesex Probate Court has already denied opponents' motions to intervene in the case, though sale opponents say they plan to pursue an appeal.
Court Filings and a Cross-State Regulatory Tangle
Five trustees filed a General Trust Petition in Middlesex County Probate Court on October 14, 2025, asking a judge to authorize the $18 million sale and dissolve the deed's camping restrictions, the Laconia Daily Sun reported at the time. Charitable trust divisions in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts opened regulatory reviews back in 2024 to determine whether selling the property to a private developer complies with public charity laws and honors the original donor's intent — reviews that continue to run alongside the probate case.
The fight over Camp Menotomy is playing out against a broader shift across New Hampshire's Lakes Region, where summer camping on the state's lakes stretches back nearly 130 years but soaring waterfront values have pushed multiple historic camps toward sale and luxury redevelopment over the past two decades, according to InDepthNH. NH LAKES, a nonprofit lake advocacy group, has separately warned that converting waterfront camps into residential subdivisions spreads septic systems and impervious surfaces along shorelines, raising water-quality risks compared with a concentrated camp footprint — concerns the group's president, Andrea LaMoreaux, has tied to the loss of forest canopy that otherwise absorbs stormwater runoff.
Before it became Camp Menotomy in 1939, the Meredith Neck property operated for decades as Camp Waubanaki, a private boys' camp run by Dr. Matthew C. O'Brien, according to the Lake Winnipesaukee Museum. When the Arlington Girl Scouts took over, they named it Menotomy after the Algonquin word for place of swift running water — the same name Arlington, Massachusetts itself carried before its 1867 renaming. Nearly a century later, that name is now attached to a court fight over whether the land keeps serving campers at all.
