"That's why Jesse Grey's estate was worthless; not because it wasn't still beautiful property but because no one had any money to buy it. So no matter what it'd cost to build it and equip it, it was worth nothing. And hopeless because there's no hope in this goddamned world for any one or any thing that isn't worth some kind of money.
"So, since it looked hopeless, just as you would've expected, if you'd thought about it at all, the Catholic fucking Church bought it. For chump change, of course, its usual price. What it generally pays if it doesn't get what it wants as a gift, absolutely for free. A hundred-ten-thousand dollars, all told, dirt-cheap even back then. Back taxes, of course, and about sixty grand in bank notes some overconfident Grey or other'd borrowed from some unusually stupid banker when the family fortune'd started to melt away meeting margin calls, month or so after the Crash. One cockeyed optimist going deeper into debt with another one, still convinced the rich kid's playground could be saved.
"A hundred-and-ten-thousand dollars. For three-hundred-and-thirty-two acres of prime land. Three-hundred-and-some bucks an acre. Bad news for the Grey family, of course, already up to its hips in bad news, but bad news too for the town of Cumberland, which didn't need any more either. That was the single most valuable parcel of property in the whole town, and just like that, it was off the assessment rolls, no longer a taxable asset. Even if and when the economy came back, as of course it did, that property wasn't going to be any use to anyone unless they had enough bucks not just to buy it but then spend rebuilding it. No one could afford to let an investment that big sit idle unless you count the Catholic Church.
"God bless the Roman Catholic Church," Larry Lane many times said, always seeming to marvel, laughing and shaking his head, as though he really had been at once utterly baffled and completely amused. "As surely He must've, a great many times, to explain what it's gotten away with. Year after year; decade after decade; the century after the centuries before, the Catholic Church marches on.
"The bishop in the Thirties here McLaughlin was his name, that much I am sure of; Francis McLaughlin, I think apparently shared the predominant view of the men who run his church that a bishop can't have too much land. Or too many buildings, as far as that goes, even if they're all fallin' down. So when Jesse's remaining heirs or their lawyers, I dunno, whoever all those people were down in Phil-la-dci-phy-ay when they put his great estate up for sale here, the only bidder in sight was the diocese of Springfield.
One-hundred-and-ten-thousand American dollars. I've got no idea how or where his sacredness came up with the money. He never confided in me.
Or what on earth he planned to do with the ramshackle place. Most people thought he didn't, either. Just get it first, and then, bye and bye, think about what you're gonna do with it. You've got plenty of time. "Forever's a very long time'; that's the way the people think in Holy Mother Church. They've got the keys to forever."
In 1948 eighteen wealthy men of the Pioneer Valley formed a real estate trust and negotiated the purchase of the property from the diocese. The deed recited that price for the transfer of the property to the Grey Hills Association, a non-profit organization newly-established by documents drawn up by one of their leaders, Warren Corey, of Butler amp;. Corey, was 'one dollar and other valuable consideration, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged." The actual price was not disclosed. "Three-hundred-odd-thousand was the price you heard quoted," Lane said, 'just under a thousand an acre. But no one outside the deal knew."
The architects the association hired to plan and oversee the beginnings of the four-year transformation shrewdly laid out the property so that the par 71, 7,241-yard championship golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, formed a natural tiara for the mansion. The country club opened in 1952, 'reinventing serenity in the beautiful valley of the Connecticut River," Life said the following year in an October feature issue entitled "Life Goes to New England in the Fall."
The architects and engineers curved the main entrance drive slightly, to preserve as many as possible of the tall oaks and broad maples forming a canopy over it, bordering the approach with low stone walls broken here and there for footpaths. Visitors approached the clubhouse among the undulating fairways and deceptively-beckoning greens of the most spectacular seven of the eighteen showcase holes, crossing the slightly arched stone bridge over South Brook into the circular drive at the main entrance hedged all around with rose, rhododendron, and lilac bushes.
