Golf in Fergus Falls: Arrived in 1921, born earlier

Lost golf courses,

Golf has had many wonderful and skilled caddies. Among the pantheon of the all-time greats are the likes of Angelo Argea (Jack Nicklaus), Herman Mitchell (Lee Trevino), Fanny Sunnesson (Nick Faldo) and Steve Williams (Tiger Woods).

Before that, there was Robert Overgaard.

Hold on. I never said Overgaard belonged among those legendary loopers. I just said,  before that  …

Robert Overgaard caddied as a youth at one of Fergus Falls’ two known lost golf courses — Riverside Links (Minnesota lost course No. 204) — and today, at age 89, would have to be one of the very few remaining Fergus Falls citizens who has firsthand memories of the course, which was situated along the south bank of the Otter Tail River just less than a mile southwest of downtown and had a nice run for a lost course, 1922 to 1940.

Overgaard’s memories of Riverside include a fellow named Tomhave who was the club’s best player despite using only irons and who thought Overgaard was a darn good caddie.

“I caddied for Tomhave, and he used me as sort of a rabbit’s foot, “Overgaard said by phone from Fergus Falls. “I had a butch, and the first time I ever caddied for him he had a real good score, and so after that, he wanted me to caddie. He’d rub my head and say, ‘Hey, come over here, I got a tough shot here’ and he’d rub my butch haircut.”

Overgaard laughed, the distant past still worth a good chuckle.

With the help of Overgaard’s memory and a smattering of old newspaper stories, an attempt at reconstructing the Riverside course can be made (the Otter Tail County Historical Society has more newspaper stories, for anyone interested in a deeper dive):

“Fergus Golf Course Ready,” proclaimed a headline in the April 29, 1922, edition of the Fergus Falls Journal. “Golf is something new in Fergus Falls,” the story began (not true; more on that to come). The nine-hole course covered 65 acres of farmland west of Park Region College, which later would become Hillcrest Lutheran Academy. “It is decidedly rolling (Overgaard pointed out that the terrain is much flatter today), giving players all the uphill and downhill that anyone could want.

“The river banks on the course afford a wonderful view of the city and a view of the Pisgah Dam and the lake above the green.”

Kenneth Fairbairn was placed in charge of the course, which to its significant credit featured grass greens. I say significant, because many 1920s-era courses in Minnesota’s smaller towns had sand greens, which were both cheaper and inferior to grass greens. But Fergus Falls had a population of 7,581 in 1920 and a well-established group of businessmen and professionals who could make a grass-greens golf course financially viable. Three doctors – H.A. Anderson, W.L. Peterson and H.J. Laffitte — were either officers or on the board of directors.

Riverside’s business structure was unusual. “It is probably the only golf course in the state that is not operated by a golf club,” the Minneapolis Tribune reported on May 13, 1928. “The Riverside Links, Inc., is a corporation of local citizens interested in golf and aiming to stimulate interest in golf, but it operates as a public golf corporation and not a club. It has leased the 65 acre course for a period of 20 years. … It relies on the sale of playing privileges entirely for its revenue.”

Overgaard’s recollection is that the Riverside plot was owned by Elmer Adams, a senator, editor and owner of much land in Fergus Falls, and the suggestion is that Adams leased the land to the golf corporation.

Overgaard did not remember the golf course’s entire routing but said the clubhouse lay near a grove of Russian olive trees just south of the river, he estimated 200 to 300 yards west of the westernmost building on the current Hillcrest Lutheran campus. “The site of the clubhouse is relatively intact,” he said.

Incidentally, the Hillcrest Lutheran Academy Comets and their football-playing brethren in the Little Eight Conference heap indignity upon the former Riverside grounds each autumn by clomping up and down the school’s football-stadium turf. Overgaard said Riverside’s first fairway would have lain right about where Westside Drive is, with the football stadium grounds perhaps at the edge of the fairway or just into the rough. (Don’t sweat it, Comets. March on.)

The first hole, Overgaard said, finished just north of Alcott Avenue, which today is farther south than it was in the 1920s and ’30s. Alcott was the course’s southern border. The course then proceeded west and north, to within perhaps 100 yards of the Pisgah Dam, and then returned home to the east. A 1939 aerial photo indicates a ninth hole alongside the Otter Tail River, probably a long dogleg, and Overgaard remembered that hooked shots could reach a watery grave.

Riverside Golf Links, Fergus Falls. 1939 aerial photo from University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. The Otter Tail River is to the north, Alcott Avenue to the south. The golf course would still have been in play at the time of this photo, and a number of green sites and hole routings are clearly visible (click on the image for a larger view).

Overgaard caddied during the Riverside course’s latter years. “It was quite nicely kept up,” he said. “The golf course was in many ways (supported by) the efforts of the businessmen to get golf established in town. It was a civic effort and got a lot of people in town interested in the game. It was only nine holes and was boxed in. … When it was gaining some momentum in the town, it became apparent they had to move.”

A site 2.8 miles southeast of downtown became the next home to golf in Fergus Falls. In 1941, Pebble Lake Golf Course opened along the southwestern shore of Pebble Lake. Its 18-hole layout was designed by probably Minnesota’s highest-profile golf course architect at the time, Paul Coates, whose design credits also include Keller in Maplewood, Stillwater Country Club and Pine Beach West at Madden’s in East Gull Lake.

PREQUEL

Riverside was not Fergus Falls’ first lost golf course, not by a long shot. That distinction belongs to a layout that preceded Riverside by more than two decades and remains largely a mystery.

The Fergus Falls Journal announced the arrival of organized golf in town on May 2, 1901. “A number of golf players have been out nearly every evening, and the game promises to be a very popular one during the coming summer,” the newspaper reported.

On May 6, the Minneapolis Journal chimed in. “Golf at Fergus Falls,” read a small headline. “The local golf club, which has just been organized, has laid out its links … and the game promises to be a very popular one this summer. A dozen enthusiasts have been practicing industriously during the past week and a large number have ordered outfits and signified their intent of joining the club.”

A more formal report came by way of the Fergus Falls Weekly. A May 23, 1901, meeting was called at the First National Bank for the purpose of “improvement of the greens.” On May 25, the Weekly reported that the Fergus Golf Club (lost course No. 205) had been organized the day before. “The game has awakened great interest here and starts out with twenty-five charter members.”

Those charter members included:

— Robert Hannah, club president, who likely knew his cleeks from his spoons as a native Scot. He was born in Ayrshire County, Scotland, in 1860, the same year the first Open championship was played at Prestwick, less than five miles from Ayrshire. Just up the road from Prestwick are two other famed golf clubs, Royal Troon and Kilmarnock. Hannah was a director of Fergus Falls’ First National Bank and is the namesake of Robert Hannah Recreational Area, alongside the Otter Tail River and just a couple of hundred yards east of the former Riverside Links grounds.

— Dr. J.G. Vigen, who as a native Norwegian perhaps didn’t own the golfing pedigree of Hannah but who certainly held stature in Fergus Falls.

Vigen and Hannah later would become charter members at the Riverside course.

Those are the known properties of Fergus Golf Club. Unfortunately, much is unknown. My guess is that the club lasted only through the 1901 season, as I could not find any references to it in searching Fergus Falls newspapers of 1902, ’03 or ’05. In any event, Fergus holds standing in Minnesota golf history. According to my research and records, it was among the first 15 golf courses built in Minnesota and among the first three built west of St. Cloud, rivaled only by Ada Golf Club (1900) and Marshall Golf Club (also 1901).

Also unknown was the Fergus Club’s course location — and there are apparent contradictions here. The Minneapolis Journal reported that the club “has laid out its links in the southwestern part of the city.” The Fergus Falls Daily Journal reported, “The links are in the vicinity of the Jefferson school building,” which was decidedly not near the southwestern part of the city but instead was more northeast, near Mount Faith and Springen avenues. The most concrete reference, however, lends credence to the southwestern notion. “The tennis court at the corner of Vernon and Union Avenues is a thing of the past,” Wheelock’s Weekly of Fergus Falls reported on May 9, 1901. “Golf promises to supplant tennis almost entirely in this neighborhood.” The intersection of Vernon and Union lies near the current southwestern corner of downtown Fergus Falls and a quarter-mile east of Robert Hannah Recreational Area.

Golf was part of Fergus Falls’ consciousness as early as 1901, as displayed by this ad from April 29, 1901. (From Minnesota Historical Society holdings)

 

Orchard Beach and Golf Club II: Paradise lost

Lost golf courses, ,

Time should have been on the side of Orchard Beach and Golf Club.

The 1920s were a wonderful time for golf — a boom time. A Minnesota chronology of golf courses published in 2002 lists 71 courses built in the 1920s, and in fact many more that were built weren’t counted in the chronology because they had been long-since abandoned. My best guess is that well over 100 Minnesota golf courses witnessed their first shank-and-a-triple-bogey in the ’20s.

Why all of this building? It was the economy, stu … oh, never mind, no name-calling today. The decade was called the Roaring Twenties for a reason. The middle class for the first time had enough expendable income to take up golf, the wealthy had more means with which to launch courses, and experts and novices alike had access to loading up the Hupmobile with hickory shafts and heading to the first tee.

Community courses, whether municipal or privately owned, popped up almost everywhere. Resort courses appeared, too, whether or not they were established for the purpose of attracting out-of-town golfers. Among them: Breezy Point (1920), Ruttger’s Bay (1922) and Tianna (1925), to name just three. Edina Country Club, originally named Thorpe Country Club and then simply The Country Club, was founded in 1923, a bauble for a large housing development built to accommodate and entertain Twin Cities suburbanites. The golf course and the city’s Country Club District became rousing successes.

So, why not Orchard Beach?

One would think, among this boom, there would have been opportunity for a place like Orchard Beach Golf and Country Club. The project was ambitious but the goal sensible: to build a golf-and-housing development less than 20 miles from downtown Minneapolis in northwestern Lakeville.

Orchard Beach and Golf Club did in fact get off the ground — like one of those 10-winged contraptions you see in old aviation films that lifts off for two seconds before folding up into a garbage heap. The project lasted less than two years and carved onto the Lakeville landscape little more than a small building, a couple of roads and a few strips of cleared land.

The question is, why did it fail?

Afraid I don’t have a good answer. Leo Harmon is the person who would know, but he left us 66 years ago.

Orchard Beach and GC presumably was the brainchild of one Leo Clinton Harmon, a Michigander who left his positions of stature to move to Minnesota in 1926. A former bank president, lumber magnate and entrepreneur (shoes, leather, electricity and baby carriages, among other ventures) in Schoolcraft County of the Upper Peninsula, Harmon left the small city of Manistique in ’26 and, according to a resume’, “moved to Minneapolis to engage in some special reorganization work for the Backus-Brooks Co., and the International Paper Company.” (The resume’ was “prepared by a friend of Mr. Harmon,” apparently published in 1929 and forwarded to me by the Gulliver Historical Society, which is in Schoolcraft County. Marilyn Fischer, president of the Gulliver HS, wrote in correspondence that Harmon is considered one of the “Great Men in Manistique’s History,” and regard for Harmon was so great that one publication held that Harmon claimed to have first devised the use of white safety stripes on highways.)

Leo Harmon, Ancestry.com image via Gulliver (Mich.) Historical Society

Harmon, though a native South Dakotan, former Montanan and longtime Michigander, was familiar with Minnesota. His father was Capt. William Harmon, who served in the famed First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the U.S. Civil War. Leo’s grandfather, Allen Harmon, lived in St. Anthony and Minneapolis, and the Harmon Place Historic District in Minneapolis is named after him. William Harmon operated steamboats between Minneapolis and Anoka and owned the Mississippi River steamer H.M. Rice.

If there were motives for Harmon, at age 54, to emerge from the Upper Michigan forest, where he presumably was wealthy and at least regionally renowned, and move to Minnesota, they are unclear. There is record of him having visited St. Paul on a business trip in 1924; its exact aims are unknown. But at some point, he turned his eyes toward a wooded, lakeside plot in Lakeville, at the time a small town of only about 500.

In October 1926, Harmon, along with Charles R. Hutchenson and M.P. LaFleur of Minneapolis, established Minnesota Lakes Inc. Real Estate, with a charter in Delaware. I failed to dig up any background on Hutcheson, but M.P. LaFleur presumably was Maynard Potter LaFleur, a World War I aviator and former professional hockey player from Eveleth, Minn., who was described in a 1982 Minneapolis Tribune story as a “real estate wheeler-dealer.” He also was dubbed “the Duke of Marquette” because he owned so much land on Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis.

On March 7, 1927, a plat map covering part of the area near Orchard Lake in Lakeville was filed with Dakota County. The area was called Club Park Addition No. 1 of Orchard Beach and Golf Club and included features hearkening back to British literature: Tennyson Court, Burns Plaza, and streets named Longfellow, Byron, Emerson and Milton, among others. (Irony: Wasn’t it Milton who wrote “Paradise Lost”?)

Courtesy Dakota County Historical Society

The first newspaper mention of Orchard Beach and Golf Club that I can find came in the June 11, 1927, edition of the Minneapolis Tribune, with a large advertisement detailing a proposed development with golfing, fishing, tennis, playgrounds and more — “An Ideal Family Private Playground. … Now Being Organized.” The ad featured a listing of advisory board members, with Harmon at the top:

“Mr. Leo C. Harmon, 185 Oak Grove St., Minneapolis, chairman, Inland Water Ways Commission; president of Tri-State Tractor Company; president of Minnesota Lakes, Inc. as sponsors of Orchard Beach and golf club; also president until recently of the First State Bank, Manistique, Michigan.”

Among the nine other advisory board members were D.C. Bennett, Minneapolis architect;  Chris Whitman, manager of The Minikahda Club in Minneapolis (Minikahda Club records list Whitman as its manager from 1916-28); and James Corr of Minneapolis, an architect and civil engineer who coincidentally was listed as surveyor of the Orchard Beach property in the aforementioned plat map.

The day after the ad appeared, the Minneapolis Tribune of June 12, 1927, published a short story headlined “Orchard Club Will Feature Recreation.” “Approximately 1,000 acres of land are being developed for the Orchard Beach and Golf Club, 17 miles from Minneapolis,” the story began. “A feature of the project will be an 18-hole golf course. Charles Harney of Chicago, amateur champion of upper Michigan, is here to lay out the course.”

There is a possible Harney-Harmon connection here. Harney lived in Escanaba, Mich., an hour’s drive from Harmon in Manistique, and won the 1921 Upper Peninsula Golf Association championship. The proposed routing of the Orchard Beach golf course, presumably executed by Harney, appears solid from a golf standpoint, and the prospects were promising, given the varied terrain.

I was unable, however, to find any evidence that Harmon ever did any other golf-course design work.

As mentioned in my previous post on Orchard Beach, it’s clear that work on the golf course and development started in 1926 or 1927, with some land cleared for roads and golf holes. It’s also clear that work stopped abruptly, probably not even 10 percent in. The most plausible explanation is money, that Harmon and/or his investors ran into issues that killed the development. Yet there is no verifiable indication that that was the case.

Leo Harmon moved on from Minnesota. Quickly, it seems. The resume’ prepared by his friend lists him as president of the Mid-West Tractor Company of Chicago from 1927-29. “In the spring of 1929,” the resume reads, “he sold his interest in that business and at the request of Colonel Francis Knox the General-manager of the 28 Hearst (news)papers, he was retained to assist in the needed re-organization of the Hearst South Street plant in New York City where Mr. Harmon served for about two years as the Asst. Business-manager of the New York Evening Journal.”

The resume’ ends at that point. Harmon moved to California sometime in the 1930s and died at age 80 on May 25, 1952, in Beverly Hills.

By then, Orchard Lake and Golf Club was a most distant memory, long since abaondoned.

 

 

 

 

Orchard Beach and Golf Club, Lakeville: Unheard of

Lost golf courses,

On a warm September afternoon, sunny and calm and a blue-ribbon day for golf, I drive south on I-35E, through Burnsville, past the freeway’s east-west merger onto I-35, past Buck Hill, take the next exit and find myself in Lakeville.

I hop off the freeway, head south a half-mile, and pull into the spot where the clubhouse is.

Or was, I guess.

I know it should be here, on this very spot, because I have studied this area closely online for more than a year.

Only … no clubhouse.  Instead, the sign on the door reads:

“Chipotle.”

Thrown off, I stop to regroup. I walk in the door and stride up to the counter.

Me: “Can I just have a small soda?”

Worker: “Two dollars and four cents.”

Me: “And the 2:44 tee time.”

Pause.

Worker: “Sorry?”

Me: “Never mind.”

I got the soda. Not the tee time.

Then again, no one ever did.

Here is an aerial view of 17599 Kenwood Trail in Lakeville, home to the burrito bowls and carnitas of Chipotle Mexican Grill. Red “C” marks the spot:

Below is the same spot, some years earlier. Seventy-three years earlier, to be precise. Again, red “C” marks the spot in this 1945 aerial photo. Only this time, “C” does not stand for Chipotle:

And below one more time, a 1927 newspaper ad promoting development of the immediate area. This time, there is an inscription next to the red “C”. Inscription reads “Golf Club House.”

This, just to the west of the flagpole, was to be the point of departure for 18 holes at Orchard Beach and Golf Club in northwestern Lakeville. But the flag, it is presumed, was never raised, and Orchard Beach instead ranks as the most unheard-of and mysterious lost-golf course site (almost-lost, to be perfectly accurate) I have come across.

A larger look at what was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club:

This is the top portion of an advertisement that appeared in the June 11, 1927, issue of the Minneapolis Tribune. The ad occupied two-thirds of a page. You can click on it to see more detail.

The preceding October, another ad had appeared in the Tribune. “Orchard Beach and Golf Club,” read the large type. In smaller type, the ad crowed: “The Most FASCINATING and SCENIC PLAYGROUND That Has Ever Been Opened to the Public.”

Hyperbole has always been a staple in golf-course promotion. This was hyperbole on Roaring Twenties steroids.

The crowing added up to a veritable din when weighed with the full ad:

These ads were just two in a series that blitzed readers of the Minneapolis Tribune in 1926 and ’27 — at least nine large display ads in June and July of 1927, plus a handful from earlier in ’27 used to recruit a sales force. Orchard Beach and Golf Club, the ads suggested, would be nothing like Twin Citians had ever seen. And it wasn’t just golf and a lake that were proffered to reader/buyers. Other ads and newspaper stories promised tennis, playgrounds, an athletic field, parks, an aviation field and a large residential development — all situated, according to an October 1926 ad, “amid rolling hills generously wooded with the virgin growth of beautiful hardwood trees and a myriad of the various wild flowers painted by Dame Nature.”

OK then.

Orchard Beach — the club, golf course and housing development — was to have encompassed an area that is loosely bordered, in 2018 terms, by Kenwood Trail on the east, 172nd Street West on the north, the southeast corner of Orchard Lake on the northwest and 185th Street West on the south. The western border likely includes parts of at least three holes on what is now Brackett’s Crossing Country Club (nee Honeywell Country Club, established in 1961). Within those proposed Orchard Beach and Golf Club confines, there is now a large, upscale residential area to the immediate east and northeast of Brackett’s Crossing, including Prairie Lake Park; the Queen Anne Courts mobile home neighborhood; and a less densely developed section of homes and hobby farm-ish land along 172nd Street and near Orchard Lake. Orchard Beach’s golf course was to be built mostly in the latter two areas.

Orchard Beach Park, Lakeville, May 2018

But the surf ‘n’ turf that was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club never quite worked out. No tee time was ever reserved, no ace served, no seesaw seen, no aerial landing landed. I can find no documentation of the project dating to 1928 or later, and the project is so unknown that one might as well suggest the Loch Ness monster once inhabited Orchard Lake as to suggest there ever were big plans for the neighborhood. I contacted or tried to contact three historical societies, one courthouse and at least a dozen residents or former residents of the area, including at least three parties who live smack-dab on top of what was to be the golf course, and never heard so much as a whisper of knowledge of the Orchard Beach project.

Yet the current lie of the land indicates site work was started, and documents confirm it.

“A sporty 18 hole golf course is under construction,” read part of a June 1927 ad in the Minneapolis Tribune. That same month, the Tribune ran a story headlined “Orchard Club Will Feature Recreation.”

“Approximately 1,000 acres of land are being developed for the Orchard Beach and Golf Club, on Lyndale avenue south, 17 miles from Minneapolis,” the story read. “The project is planned as one of the most completely equipped private recreational grounds in the northwest. The work has been under way since last fall.”

Orchard Beach would not have been Lakeville’s first golf course. The 1920s marked the heyday of golf at Antlers Park Golf Links, an offshoot of the popular Antlers Park Amusement Park owned by George O’Rourke on the southeastern shore of Lake Marion, only three miles southeast of Orchard Lake. In August 1927, as construction of the Orchard Beach course presumably was underway, the Dakota County Tribune ran a story under the headline “Antlers Golf Course Is Attracting More City Artists,” and noting the Antlers Park course had been expanded from nine to 18 holes. (The Antlers Park course closed in 1938.)

It’s likely that Antlers Park and Orchard Beach would not have been direct competitors. Antlers was a public course, while Orchard Beach would presumably have been private, limited to paying members of the club, or perhaps open to the public but at a higher greens fee.

————————–

Orchard Beach and Golf Club is, to steal without apologies to Sir Winston Churchill, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It’s 99 percent certain that the project started, but it’s even more certain it was never finished. As with any worth-its-salt mystery, clues have been left. Some are stored in aerial photos.

What follows is something of a time-lapse sequence of the area southwest of Orchard Lake, i.e. the proposed home to Orchard Beach and Golf Club. No aerial photos before the mid-1930s are readily available, so the 1927 proposed development, shown earlier, can be used as the earliest reference point.

In 1937, this is how the area looked. Though the Orchard Beach project had presumably been abandoned for a decade by then, clear signs of it remain. I marked the general confines of the proposed development with a red border and letter-coded other notable landmarks, either likely or speculative. (All but one aerial photo in this post are courtesy of the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. Click on the images for closer looks.)

L — Lyndale Avenue. At the time, this was the main drag out of downtown Minneapolis, through Bloomington, across the Minnesota River and south to Lakeville.

R – Railroad. This was the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern Railway. In the 1920s, it was known as the Dan Patch Railroad, an electric and then steam line whose stops included Antlers Park.

C – Orchard Beach and Golf Club clubhouse. I have no verification that this building was in fact the clubhouse, but its location is a near-exact match with the drawing in the 1927 Minneapolis Tribune ad.

R2 – Road. And nothing more, really, except one of the clearest indications that work had been done on the Orchard Beach development. The road marked the southern edge of the proposed golf course, traveled west, turned north, and eventually connected with 172nd Street West. In the 1927 ad, the road can clearly be seen cutting through the middle of the proposed development.

O and BP — Orchard Lake and what the developers dubbed Orchard Lake Beach Park. Today, Orchard Beach Park lies in almost exactly the same place.

S – Streets — or, more accurately, proposed streets. Compare the pattern of rectangles with the same in the Tribune ad. No houses are apparent along these rectangular lines, but the lines do indicate that land was cleared for the purpose of putting in streets.

Moving along to 1945:

What’s notable in the eight years since the 1937 photo? Not all that much, except for notable improvement in the resolution of aerial photography. But this land stayed largely the same, except for more development to the east of Lyndale Avenue. This photo lends veracity to the notion that land had been cleared almost 20 years earlier for the purposes of building a golf course. I sketched the proposed routing on this photo, in green lines that correspond to the 1927 drawing. Best guess is that land was cleared for about half the course in 1926 and ’27 before the project was stopped for unknown reasons. This sketched routing is entirely plausible for the path of a reputable 18-hole golf course, and an accomplished (not renowned) golfer was hired to design the course. I will post more about the project’s principals shortly.

Click for a larger look at the photo and see if you know anyone who might have lived on one of these “holes.”

By 1957 (below), U.S. Highway 65 had been built; it cut through the southeastern corner of what was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club. Within a decade, the route would become I-35:

A look at 1964:

A few more roads had been built near Orchard Lake; the road that cut through the south side of the property had effectively disappeared; and, most notably, the mobile home park now known as Queen Anne Courts had been built near I-35, between Lyndale Avenue and the defunct railroad line.

Finally, 2018 (U.S. Geological Survey photo):

O – Orchard Lake

G – Area of proposed Orchard Beach golf course

B – Brackett’s Crossing Country Club

C – Chipotle/Orchard Beach and Golf Club clubhouse

Next post: The people behind Orchard Beach and Golf Club and the mystery of its demise.

Hutchinson Golf Club and its closest of relatives

Lost golf courses, ,

Next time you drive through west-central Minnesota and find yourself in the city of Hutchinson, turn north on California Street and head up to its intersection with 8th Avenue Northwest.

Goodness’ sake, don’t stop. Just drive past casually, don’t pull over, don’t knock on any doors, don’t draw any attention to yourself or the peace-seeking residents.

This is history, but no one has to know it.

No one has to care, either. And very few probably will. But I’ll fill you in anyway.

The intersection of California and 8th signals of one of the more unusual convergence of golf-course sites in Minnesota. That’s because you can look one way — just a few yards to the east — and see where ladies and gentlemen with hickory-shafted MacGregors used to four-putt the old sand green at Hutchinson Golf Club, or you can drive a few hundred more yards north on California, zip into a parking space at Country Club Manor apartments — don’t take a resident’s parking spot! — get out, and take a gander at Hutchinson GC’s immediate successor: Crow River Country Club.

Among Minnesota’s 200-plus lost golf courses, I can think of no other place where a golf club abandoned a course in one place and reopened so nearby, yet not on the same site, and not to mention so soon.

Have a look:

1940 aerial photo: grounds of Hutchinson Golf Club, designated “A,” and Crow River Country Club, designated “B.” The thin vertical line near the “A” is what would become California Street, with the golf course — it had been abandoned for one year at the time of this photo — to the right (east). The Crow River site, in the rectangle marked “B” and only nine holes at the time, is in its infancy, with Campbell Lake to the left (west). The “A” site can be distinguished as a golf course by bright, white circles, some of which were sand greens. Twin Oaks Apartments & Townhomes occupies much of that site today. Downtown Hutchinson is just off the bottom-right corner of the photo. (Courtesy University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Library. Click on the photo for a closer look.)

Incidentally, a third golf course — and second of the lost variety — also lies only a couple of hundred yards away. The Meadow Links course (1999-circa 2015) was just across McLeod County Highway 12, or Golf Course Road, from both the Hutchinson GC site and Crow River CC.

Hutchinson Golf Club got its start on the “California Street” site — albeit there was no such street at the time — in the late 1920s. On April 25, 1926, the Minneapolis Tribune reported, “The Hutchinson golf club has leased 35 acres of ground from D.S. Todd, about a mile west of the city, and will lay out a first class golf course. The officers of the club plan to have an expert here soon to lay out the course. The land is ideal, rolling and with good natural hazards.”

Typically, a new golf course would take about one season to grow in and be ready for play. That appeared to be the case in Hutchinson. A story in the May 22, 1927, Minneapolis Tribune again mentioned the purchase of the Todd land and a golf course of nine holes, par 34, 2,400 yards long, with sand traps and bunkers, a toolhouse and rain shelter and “a competent caretaker.” E.S. Noreen was club president, and the Leader reported that a flock of sheep would graze the site.

On June 17, 1927, the Hutchinson Leader reported that a club tournament would be held two days hence, with a fee of 25 cents for “eight holes.” The suspicion here is that the number of holes was misstated, because on June 24, the Leader reported that 23 players participated, with Charles Borkenhagen low man with a 43 “for nine holes.”

And here, an admission: Although it’s almost certain that golf in Hutchinson formally began a decade earlier, I whiffed on confirming that. The May Minneapolis Tribune story ran under the headline “Hutchinson Golf Club Enters Second Decade” but made no mention of a course that would have preceded the one on the Todd land. A source in the city said there had indeed been a predecessor, and that there was written confirmation of it, but no one ever got back to me with such confirmation. An update on this paragraph is at the end of the story.

Hutchinson Golf Club — on the Todd site — had about 75 members in 1926, the Leader reported. Play continued there through the 1930s. In 1932, new bunkers were added, and a membership drive brought in players from the nearby cities of Brownton, Glencoe, Stewart and Buffalo Lake. In May 1934, a clubhouse was moved from the site “of the old Triple L Hatchery to the southwest corner of the course at the No. 1 tee,” the Leader reported. This would have been near the current home of Hutchinson Auto Sales, just north of 4th Avenue Southwest/Highways 7 and 22. The caretaker in 1934 was Richard Ahlbrecht, and club president was Dr. W.L. Bahr.

The late 1930s brought about an itch to move.

“Golf Club Has Plans Ready,” the Leader reported on April 15, 1938.  Work was expected to start by May 1 on a new site, northwest of the Todd site and near Campbell Lake, and “a total of $6,000 was subscribed to build the new course.”

The previous month, the Leader had reported that Earle M. Barrows, “an expert in golf course construction,” had visited Hutchinson and obtained a contour map of the 54.5-acre plot owned by the W.E. Harrington estate on which a new course would be built, “with watered greens and fairways, and grass greens.”

Barrows had a solid golf background. He was in the real estate business, according to a 1920 Minneapolis city directory, and in 1923 was elected chairman of Bloomington Golf Club as that club evolved from the Automobile Club of Minneapolis. Bloomington GC, now known as Minnesota Valley, was the product of famed golf course designer Seth Raynor (a notion that, to be fair, is disputed by some golf historians, though there is little question Raynor’s influence came into play at Bloomington GC). Barrows also was an early golf turfgrass expert and collaborated with J.A. Hunter of Minneapolis to lay out the now-lost Hilltop Golf Links course in Columbia Heights (1926-46).

In July 1938, construction of the greens at the new Hutchinson course was in full force. The greens, the Leader reported, were to be seeded between Aug. 15 and Sept. 1 with Northern Bent grass. “The show green, No. 5, at the approach to the course, will be 7,000 square feet in size,” the newspaper reported. “With favorable conditions the course will be ready for play next summer, and all observers say it will be among the most beautiful and picturesque in the state.”

The new course, renamed Crow River Country Club by the Hutchinson GC members, opened in May 1939.  The Leader reported that it was 3,155 yards long, par 36, with these hole yardages: 360, 177, 446, 300, 200, 460, 415, 385 and 412. “Several greens are in the woods,” the newspaper said, “and the entire course overlooks the lake.” Edwin Nurse was retained as one caretaker, and Harvey Hoff was brought on as another. Work was being started on a clubhouse measuring 24 by 56 feet.

Crow River CC staged its first shortstop tournament on June 25, with an entry fee of $1. Entrants were from Hutchinson, Brownton, Buffalo, Buffalo Lake, Cokato, Dassel, Glencoe, Stewart and Winthrop. Cliff Popp won, with nine-hole rounds of 44, 43 and 43.

In 1978, Crow River expanded to the 18-hole layout it is today.

Update, May 2019: I found an update on the history of golf in Hutchinson in the “McLeod County History Book” of 1978. It identifies the city’s first lost golf course, plus one other that doesn’t quite meet muster as a full-fledged course (has to have at least six holes, in my opinion).

Golf in Hutchinson began, the history book reports, with four or five holes in a pasture on the Ingebretsen farm about three miles east of Hutchinson, southeast of a farmhouse bordering the Great Northern railroad tracks. In October 1923, a meeting was held to discuss renting land on the Herman Schmidt farm 2.5 miles northwest of town, on the northwestern shore of Otter Lake. That course’s first tournament was held on June 15, 1924 (making Hutchinson Golf Club I Minnesota lost course No. 207 on my list).

1916 plat map of area around northern Otter Lake in Hutchinson. The plot in red was owned by F. Schmidt and — best guess — is where the first full-fledged golf course in Hutchinson lay. Plat map from John Borchert Map Library, University of Minnesota.

Jimmy Johnston and the 1929 U.S. Amateur: One more thing

Golf history

Watching this year’s U.S. Amateur wind down to the final match (Devon Bling vs. Viktor Hovland) at Pebble Beach Golf Links, it’s hard for me to take my eyes off the unrelenting beauty of the golf course and Monterey Bay. It’s also hard for me, when the coverage turns to the final hole, to take my eyes off the spot, a little more than halfway up No. 18, from where St. Paul’s Jimmy Johnston hit the Shot on the Rocks that helped propel him to victory in the 1929 U.S. Amateur.

I wrote about Johnston’s historic shot in last week’s St. Paul Pioneer Press — twincities.com/2018/08/11/shot-on-the-rocks-st-paul-golfer-jimmy-johnstons-quest-to-win-a-major-championship/ — and keep thinking about Johnston and his caddie standing on the rocks 89 years ago and sizing up the recovery shot that led to a par and the halve of the hole in Johnston’s championship match against Oscar Willing (Johnston ultimately won, 4 and 3).

Oh, about that caddie …

A phone call last week from a Johnston family member called my attention to a piece of Pebble Beach-U.S. Amateur trivia.

The fellow standing alongside Johnston in the 1929 final was a Pebble Beach caddie named Dede Gonsalves. When the U.S. Amateur returned to Pebble in 1961, a 21-year-old from Upper Arlington, Ohio, arrived at the tournament and, according to the story I was told, went searching for the best Pebble Beach caddie he could find.

The golfer’s name was Jack Nicklaus. He went on to win the tournament — and, of course, a few more. The caddie Nicklaus had been lined up with was one Dede Gonsalves — the same man who had looped for Johnston en route to the championship 32 years earlier.

Below, a photo of Gonsalves and Nicklaus in the 1961 U.S. Amateur, taken from the pages of Neil Hotelling’s book “Pebble Beach: The Official History.” (Original photo credit PBC-Graham/Brooks)