Beach property nets Amherst College $58 million
By Peter Schworm, Globe Staff
Amherst College may lack ocean-front property in the Pioneer Valley, but owning a sliver of the California coastline has netted the school a $58 million windfall.
The deep-pocketed private college, which already boasts a $1.6 billion endowment, received its largest single contribution last month when it sold a stretch of beach in San Clemente, Calif., that a member of the class of 1919 donated to the school four decades ago.
Roger C. Holden, an investor who died in 1968, established a trust that bequeathed the eventual rights to the beachfront property to Amherst. Holden’s widow remained the beneficiary of the land, and rented it to vacationers until she died in 2006 at age 97.
Amherst sold the land to a homeowners' group representing residents of Capistrano Shores, a beach seven-tenths of a mile long that includes some 90 cottages.
In a statement, Mark Howlett, president of the group, thanked the college for ‘‘a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’’
‘‘We are delighted that the transaction is now complete and that the residents and their families will own their beach cottages on the Pacific Ocean for decades to come,’’ Howlett said in a statement.
When he bequeathed it, Holden’s land was valued at $1.5 million. When college officials began looking into the value of the land, they were stunned to learn of its exponential increase.
‘‘I think a windfall is a pretty accurate way to describe it,’’ Megan Morey, the college’s chief advancement officer, said today. ‘‘We had no sense of the value.’’
The proceeds of the pledge dwarf the next largest donation to the college, an anonymous gift of $25 million in the 1990s.
Amherst, which had previously named a campus theater after Holden, plans to create an endowed professorship in theater and dance in his honor for $2.5 million. College officials have not determined how to spend the rest of the proceeds.
