A Spruce Hill story

Hello. I’m Dayle.

But right now I’m not Dayle. I’m a tropical dancer.

And now I’m an Indian.

And now I have a pretend raccoon.

No, it’s a real raccoon! Found him in my barn when he was just born. His eyes couldn’t even open yet. My parents let me keep him. I named him Terry.

We live in this house.

It’s very old and has 17 rooms. We live in the small part. It has five rooms. We stay there because it has a heating system. The rest of the house is freezing unless you burn wood in the fireplaces all day. It has three floors if you count the rooms way up inside the roof. Those were for servants a long time ago.

We do fun things here. We make apple cider.

And we read books.

And play hockey. That’s my brother, Sumner.

And we take care of the barn, where horses used to live. Raccoons sneak in. Bats too. Every kid in the neighborhood knows about the bats.

The history books call our house the Frothingham Mansion because a priest named Nathaniel Frothingham built it a long time ago, around 1852. He was the pastor of the First Church of Boston, and he was friends with the Sewall family in Burlington, so he came here a lot and really liked the town.

My dad is George. He’s a teacher and coach in Belmont and Maynard and other towns. I don’t know how he bought this huge house. He probably had to borrow a lot of money.

We moved here in 1946 because he always wanted to start a summer camp for kids. Our house is on a hill with lots of spruce trees and hiking trails everywhere, so my father calls the camp the Spruce Hill Day Camp.

Kids come from all around. Arlington, Somerville, Cambridge. Some Burlington High School teachers work here in the summer. Here are some camp teachers.

Here’s my dad talking to another teacher.

Some kids ride our bus to camp.

They do a lot of fun things here.

The kids learn a lot, but my parents learn too. My mother had to figure out how to operate a school cafeteria. My mother and my grandmother spend a lot of time in the hot kitchen all summer, making hot food. There’s no air conditioning. Sometimes they wear cold, wet face cloths around their necks.

My dad has learned a lot too, like how to build a big swimming pool in the ground.

The kids used to swim in a pond out back, but it had too many creatures living in it. My brother would wear a big top hat and go underwater, then come up with a frog on top of it. So my dad hired the Thorstensens to dig a big hole so he could put in tar paper, painted blue like an ocean, and fill it with water. Our pool is the only one like it in Burlington. It’s even in a magazine!

My brother Sumner and little cousin Michael like to glide around the pool in Sumner’s boat. He made it himself.

We have no way to keep the water clean, so we have to take out the old water and put in new water every two weeks. That means we have to carry a heavy fire hose all the way down our dirt driveway to a fire hydrant on Lexington Street. Every time we fill the pool, that water is VERY cold!

In the winter, the pool freezes. But Dad does not let anyone play hockey or even skate on the pool because skates will damage the sides. So everyone uses the pond. My mother shoots hockey pucks and Sumner plays goalie.

Maybe someday when our pool is gone, and the whole camp is gone, and we don’t live here anymore, there will be some way for people to remember Spruce Hill Day Camp.

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Epilogue

The operation expanded to include a kindergarten before Burlington offered public kindergarten, and then a nursery school — all within the huge house. In the late 1950s, the fledgling Burlington Country Club rented the pool for swimming “after hours.” In 1967, the Rupprechts sold the property to the Cambridge YWCA, which modernized the pool.

In July of 1982, Mystic Valley Mental Health bought it as a group home, to the consternation of some locals. Mysterious fires broke soon afterward.

In the early 1990s, a Burlington boy named Tony Santullo bought the property, renovated the house and built a little cul-de-sac with more houses (Theresa Ave.) 

The long, sinuous driveway to the house is now Shady Lane Drive and, of course, Spruce Hill Road, named after the camp. The Frothingham estate included a gatehouse at the start of Spruce Hill and another house across Lexington Street, where the name survives.

 

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