Greg Carr, who grew up in Idaho and then founded the Internet company Prodigy, is leading an effort to transform the former Aryan Nations' site into a place of progress and stability. Carr, whose Cambridge, MA-based Carr Foundation bought the property in March for $250,000, would like to incorporate the retreat, or children's camp devoted to adversity, with the group's public human-rights center in nearby Coeur d'Alene.

A lawsuit bankrupted the property's former owner, Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, who lost the property in the proceedings. Butler, now 83, first moved to northern Idaho in 1973 and assembled one of the nation's largest contingents of skinheads, uniformed racists and anti-Semites. Butler's following has dwindled to about a dozen members.