Springfield Massachusetts Boys Club Camp - Brimfield

03/12/2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOuMzFULYWg

Taken October 16, 2021

03/12/2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GudXVq0GpEs

Taken October 16, 2021

06/03/2018

Link to the current Springfield Boys and Girls Club Summer Camp Program. Help them out if you can.

http://www.sbgc.org/summer-camp-program/

06/03/2018

A few older pictures found on someones Flickr account.

Explore this photo album by Preservation Massachusetts on Flickr!

02/24/2016

Does anyone remember details of the Old Man Logan story?

06/28/2015

This satellite picture of the camp shows how far from the camp the new solar panels are. There are also new access roads going to solar farm.

06/28/2015

by Michael Puttre on Wednesday 18 June 2014

In June 2011, a deadly tornado ripped through central Massachusetts, carving a path of destruction through Springfield and towns to the East. In Brimfield, the storm made a ruin of facilities owned by the Springfield Boys & Girls Club.

Soltas Holdings, the solar power development business owned by GameChange Racking CEO Andrew Worden, acquired the 300 acres and repurposed them for a 6.25 MW solar project.

"A local contact introduced us to the boys club, and we bought the land," Worden says. "After the tornado damage, the road-front land was just really trashed, and the land was a really good value."

The land consisted of three parcels fronted by main road, of which two were suitable for solar arrays. The third parcel consisted mainly of wetlands and was left undeveloped. The usable parcels sloped up to a plateau. However, the land was quite rocky - typical for New England - and thus unsuitable for a post-driven ground-mount system.

For this reason, Worden says his team elected to use Game Changer’s Pour-In-Place ballasted ground-mount system. Combined, the two arrays consist of 5,500 seven-foot Styrofoam leave-behind forms. Supports placed in each form support the rails, which, in turn, support 23,000 Canadian Solar panels. Concrete poured into the forms provides the ballast and ground support. Inverters are Solectria XT transformerless units.

"Interconnect was actually really easy because the tornado took all the original wires down," Worden says. "National Grid had gone in there and put in brand new wires that had much more capacity."

The project, which has recently been sold, has a number of off-takers, including the Greater Lowell Vocational Technical High School, in Tyngsborough. The protect was one of the last to qualify under Massachusetts’ original solar renewable energy certificate (SREC) program. The commonwealth has since launched a revised SREC II program.

Worden says the solar project has turned a local disaster into a benefit for Brimfield, which had been receiving only a couple of thousand dollars a year in taxes from the land when it was owned by a nonprofit organization.

"All of a sudden, we’re paying $87,000 in taxes a year," Worden says. "It's like the town getting one-and-a-half policemen."

06/28/2015

This is the latest satellite picture of the camp. All six cottages are gone now. So are Rotary Hall, Dexter Hall. Doc's Cottage, The New Building, The Fancy Rest Rooms, The Covered Pavilion and the Pump Houses. The only buildings left standing are the Administration Building, The Pool House and The Staff Shacks. You may also notice about a million trees are also missing. Maybe someday the pool will be used again but I doubt it.

06/01/2015

A few people have written asking for the URL of the official web page. But sadly there isn't one. The camp has been closed for 6 years now and was destroyed by a tornado 4 years ago today. The camp is no longer owned by the Springfield Boy's and Girl's Club. A solar farm in being built on part of the site and the rest was donated to the town of Brimfield. There are a number of historic buildings on the site that are no longer safe or repairable. But that is now the headache of the Town of Brimfield not the Springfield Boy's and Girl's Club. The pictures you see on this site are unfortunately the last we will see of our old Summer camp.

02/08/2015

Peter Picknelly Sr. If you ever swam in the pool at the camp, this is the man to thank for it. He was very generous to the camp. I have heard he was a camper there as a child. Although I am not sure if that is true or not.

06/11/2014

Rest In Peace James Korney (2/5/22 - 12/16/13).
Jim always held an affinity for the Springfield Boy’s Club because it afforded the inner city youth of his era a positive constructive environment be it basketball, swimming or attending the Boys Club Camp in nearby Brimfield, Massachusetts. http://www.newportri.com/obituaries/james-korney/article_53063a60-68f5-11e3-bcbd-001a4bcf887a.html

PORTSMOUTH – Mr. James Korney. Born on February 5, 1922 at Prescott, Massachusetts (now the current Quabbin Reservoir) to Mrs. Ann and John Korney, a Russian immigrant family from a post WWI Russia, Jim passed away peacefully in the company of his eldest son, James, at Atria Aquidneck Place in Ports…

06/11/2014

BRIMFIELD – A 6.24 megawatt, 22,000-panel solar farm project is under way off Route 20 on land recently purchased from Springfield Boys & Girls Club. http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/08/624_megawatt_solar_farm_under.html

New York City-based businessman Andrew Worden, 47, purchased 323 acres from the Springfield Boys and Girls Club for $200,000 on July 30