Brunswick Acquires Campus in Randolph, Vt.

 

After nearly a year of research, planning, and a site visit/inspection in April by members of the Board of Trustees, Brunswick took ownership of a new campus in Randolph, Vt., on Sept. 14.

The property encompasses more than 650 acres of wilderness, hiking trails, and open fields — providing the ideal environment for a permanent, fully integrated, off-campus wilderness-education and applied-classroom-learning program now under development by Brunswick faculty and school leaders, Headmaster Thomas W. Philip said.

Brunswick alumnus Jesse F. “Sam” Sammis III ’56, chairman of Greenwich’s New England Land Company, approached the school in 2016 with the idea of establishing a permanent home for an “away” program at the vast Green Mountain Stock Farm and surrounding hills and woodlands.

He’d owned the property since 1971.

The purchase price was $2.14 million, entirely covered by “extraordinary and exceptionally generous gifts” from two anonymous donors, Philip said.

Green Mountain Stock Farm includes Three Stallion House, a three-story, 6,100-square-foot farmhouse with six bedrooms. In addition, Morgan House, sited nearby on one acre, is a 3,500-square-foot residence with seven bedrooms.

The property also encompasses 668 acres and a 35-kilometer network of trails.

“We’re very fortunate that the site not only includes so much wilderness, but also buildings that can be so easily adapted to house visiting faculty and students,” Philip said.

Set to start at the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year, Brunswick’s Vermont program is now in the planning stages. When the new initiative gets underway, plans now call for small groups of students to spend approximately 10 days in Vermont, with activities beyond normal classroom time including rural and farm upkeep, and potential local internship opportunities.

“In the meantime,” Philip said, “Brunswick faculty and staff will be visiting Randolph and staying on site as our plans continue to evolve.”

Philip sees the Vermont initiative as the “capstone” of the Brunswick Trust, the school’s overall program to ensure excellence in character-and-leadership education.

“In an ever more technological world, having the sensitivity, self-awareness, skill, and patience to communicate directly, to communicate in a human way — in person, eye to eye, in the same space with others — will, in our ‘new’ world, serve as the defining characteristic of those most successful in both business and in life,” Philip said.

“That’s what we’re focusing on here,” he said. “In Vermont, there will be no televisions, no iPhones, or Netflix.

“Boys will prepare their own food, clean their own rooms, read and work together in groups, and, yes, make their own beds — just as Admiral William H. McRaven suggests in this past summer’s Brunswick Trust read, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life and Maybe the World.

“More than anything, the Vermont experience will be real, not Photoshopped. Inclusive, not exclusive. Unpredictable, not staged. Such is the stuff, we believe, that serves to prepare young men for life in the near- and long-term.”