There they are: Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses. Click on the red type for a closer, interactive look.
Some background:
Five months ago, during one of my marathon sessions poking around on Google Maps, searching for this lost clubhouse or that lost water hazard or that farmer’s back 40 that used to be a back nine, I stumbled on a remarkable feature: Google makes it possible for visitors to create their own maps. Why, you could make a Google map of where family members live, two or three or five branches down the family tree; a Google map of all the golf courses you’ve played; or a Google map of, oh, I don’t know, the 20 most godawful truck stops in America you’ve visited.
My Google map, no surprise, just had to be of Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses.
I spent about three hours that night creating the map, placing more than 80 “markers” in spots in Minnesota that correspond to sites of lost golf courses. For me, it was the kind of exercise I couldn’t stop with once I started. I love maps. I remember sketching out dozens of maps of states when I was a kid, and I even remember — this is a 45-years-overdue confession, Sister Martha Ann McGinnis, former principal of St. Mary’s Elementary School in Caledonia — once carefully drawing in an extra red-ink line on a map of South America that would cause the next owner of the textbook to unwittingly incorrectly answer a question about the railroads of Brazil.
But I digress. (I do that often.)
The Google map of Minnesota’s lost golf courses was made public a few months ago, though I didn’t advertise it. I’ll admit, I wanted to wait until closer to the release date of my book. Now that the book is a week away, maybe less, from being printed, I thought I would give folks an opportunity to see exactly where the lost golf courses I came across were situated.
Because Google’s mapping capabilities are so highly detailed, I was able to place most of the lost-course map markers within just a couple of hundred yards of the actual site of the lost course. If, for instance, you want to know where the old Hilltop Public Golf Links site was, you can zoom in just a little bit and see that it was in the northeastern corner of the city of Columbia Heights. Or you can zoom in really close and see the EXACT spot of the course — that house at the northeast corner of Chatham Road and 45th Avenue Northeast is the house of the former Hilltop course caretaker. The clubhouse was just across Chatham.
On the same map, you can see the Columbia Heights Ultrafiltration Plant, which the golf course wrapped around; Kordiak Park, which was the northern boundary of the course; and a Columbia Heights water tower, which occupies a spot right about where the 17th green used to be. If you really know what you’re looking for, you can even spot a brick “gatehouse” by the Ultrafiltration Plant that golfers used to bounce their balls off of, leading to really cheap pars. (More about that in the book.)
So … was there a bunker in your back yard? Or maybe your neighborhood, your city or your county? The map might tell you.
A few caveats:
— I wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact locations on about one-quarter of the lost courses mentioned in the book. For example, I can’t tell you exactly where Midiron Country Club in Mountain Iron was situated, so I had to settle for simply placing a marker on the city of Mountain Iron. If you go to the Web page with the map and look down the listing of courses in the left-hand menu, you’ll see designations that show which locations I can almost exactly identify and which are less precise.
— I can’t claim that these are ALL of the lost courses in Minnesota, any more than anyone could claim to make a map of, say, all of the sites of meteorite landings in Kazakhstan. I identified the courses that have some sort of verifiable proof of having existed. I know there are more. If you know of any, or know of any corrections to the map that I should make, I welcome your comments or a personal email to me at bissenjoe@gmail.com.
Enjoy!
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Dear Joe, I have been searching for information about Hilltop for some time now. I live in Tennessee these days after growing up in Illinois but my Dad played a lot of his golf at Hilltop in the late 30’s and the 40’s before moving to Illinois in the 50’s. He was even the club president one year. I have a picture of Mom and Dad in front of the Hilltop clubhouse with its name on the rooftop. I am very interested in purchasing your book to learn all that I can about Hilltop since I cannot get to Minneapolis to go through old newspapers. Dad loved golf so much…he won something called the Hilltop Twilight league a couple of times. Needless to say any information you have in your book about Hilltop will be much appreciated. Thank you for including Hilltop in your book…Jim
Thanks for posting the comment, Jim. There is a whole lot of Hilltop in the book. It’s Chapter 4, titled “Bang It Off the Tower.” There should be a button nearby where you can order the book, or you can do it through Amazon.com. Best wishes. jb