I could stare at this old golf photo for hours. Well, minutes, for sure, and that’s still saying something.
The image was forwarded to me by Tom Steman, university archivist and professor at St. Cloud State University. He dug this out of the SCSU catacombs or more likely old folders and passed it along to me after the two of us had a long discussion about the likely location of the lost course on the St. Cloud State campus.
The photo is not from the campus course. Steman noted, “We have the print of this image that appeared in a pamphlet/booklet advertising St. Cloud State that dates circa 1919. The published photo appears in a section that shows images from around St. Cloud. The caption simply says ‘Golf Links.’ ”
In all likelihood, this photo is of St. Cloud Country Club, perhaps in its inaugural season of 1919 (and more than a decade after the birth and death of St. Cloud Golf Club), which was not the same place. I have no other information or speculation to offer.
No more words. Take a look and, I hope, enjoy. (You can click on it for a larger view.)
One firm request: The photo is courtesy of the St. Cloud State University Archives and needs to be credited as such if anyone is inclined to share it.
St. Cloud, Minnesota, can accurately be described by either of two monikers. Choose your favorite:
“Granite City”
“Central Minnesota’s Geographical Midpoint of Holy Cow That’s a Ton of Lost Golf Courses”
Picked the first one, didn’t you. Hard to argue. For one thing, “Granite City” does roll off the tongue easier than the abomination that is moniker No. 2. For another, the hard-and-durable construction rock — granite — has been harvested in and around St. Cloud since the 1880s, and, after all, golf in St. Cloud has been around only since 1899.
Yes, 1899. I’ll get to it.
Within 35 miles of the St. Cloud city limits, I know of 13 lost golf courses, not including two that never really qualified as full-fledged venues for whiffing and dubbing. This number dwarfs the mere two that I wrote about in “Fore! Gone.”: the city-owned Hillside course in St. Cloud from 1930-45 and the nine-holer on the St. John’s University campus in Collegeville, circa 1926-33.
I’ll call this my St. Cloud lost-course mulligan. Allow me to cast light on a few more abandoned layouts. Just so you know, it’s going to take multiple posts. Also just so you know, by the time I’m done, I will have come up just shy of the 200 mark in identifying lost golf courses across Minnesota, so I’ll be designating with numbers as I go along.
THERE, AND NOT THERE
St. Cloud Country Club, which nestles up against the Mississippi River on the south side of the Granite City, is one of Minnesota’s classic old golf clubs. Established in 1919, it ranks among the first 35 or 40 clubs in state history. (A 2002 chronology of Minnesota golf courses ranks it among the first 26, but to be perfectly accurate, there are courses that the chronology missed.) St. Cloud CC has hosted one men’s State Amateur championship and two women’s State Ams. The course was, by all accounts that I know of, designed by the redoubtable Tom Vardon.
But it was not St. Cloud’s first golf course.
Take it from the May 10, 1899, edition of the St. Cloud Daily Times.
“NEW GOLF CLUB.” read the headline, with the story following.
“A meeting of those interested in the game of golf was held last evening in the council chambers and the St. Cloud Golf Club was duly organized with 27 charter members,” the newspaper reported. “… The membership fee was placed at $5. It is believed that a large number will become members of the new club as soon as the game is more thoroughly understood.”
To be clear: St. Cloud Golf Club (lost course No. 191), established 1899, and St. Cloud Country Club, established 1919, were, judging by every piece of information I have come across, separate organizations in separate places. There might have been coincidental carryover from GC to CC in the form of members or maybe bylaws, but they are/were not the same golf club.
Two weeks before the formal inception of St. Cloud GC, the Daily Times had offered other details.
Headline, April 24: “GOLF LINKS LAID.”
Story: “For some time the admirers of golf have been aggitating (sic) the formation of a club in this city and it is expected that such an organization will be formed this week.
“The links have been laid by Robert Foulis, of St. Paul, and he pronounces them as the equal of any in the cities, barring the fact that two railroad tracks are crossed here.
“The tee is located at the ball park, and the total length of the links are two and a fifth miles. From the tee to the first hole is 552 yards; to the second from this, 468; to the third, 250; fourth, 480; fifth, 512; sixth, 460; seventh, 296; eighth, 616; ninth, 360, making a total of 3,984 yards.
“The St. Cloud Golf club should start out with a large membership, and it undoubtedly will. O.H. Havill, Warren Freeman and H.R. Welsh are the promoters of the new club.”
Digging into the details:
— The 1899 start date makes St. Cloud Golf Club one of Minnesota’s first nine golf courses, by my count, matched or preceded only by Town & Country Club and Roadside of St. Paul; Winona Golf Club and Meadow-Brook of Winona; Bryn Mawr, Minikahda and Camden Park of Minneapolis; and Northland of Duluth. (This list updates revisions since this was first posted.)
— The mention of Robert Foulis is historically significant. Foulis is a larger-than-life figure from the first decade of Minnesota golf. He was a native Scotsman who worked for the legendary Old Tom Morris at his shop in St. Andrews, then moved to the Chicago area in 1895 and to St. Paul in 1896 as the first professional at Minnesota’s first golf course, Town & Country Club. Foulis’ talents included swing instruction, club making and course architecture. His design and redesign credits (some contributions are disputed) include Town & CC, Minikahda and the lost Bryn Mawr course in Minneapolis, Lake Forest (now Onwentsia) in the Chicago area and Bellerive in suburban St. Louis.
Foulis is correctly credited in some online and printed circles with the design of St. Cloud Golf Club, albeit without noting the distinction between GC and CC, and he is mistakenly credited in other references with the design of St. Cloud Country Club. Foulis hardly could have been involved in the Country Club design, as he had moved to the St. Louis area by 1901 and did most of his subsequent design work in Missouri.
— The length of the course is stunning. A nine-holer covering 3,984 yards, especially before the turn of the 20th century, would have been remarkably long, and a course with a longest hole of 616 yards and nothing shorter than 250 would be daunting even by today’s standards.
— As with so many lost courses, determining the course’s location can be confusing, confounding and ultimately not 100 percent confirmable. Such is the case with St. Cloud GC, though with the help of three researchers at the Stearns County Museum and a few hours of sleuthing on the side, I am more than 95 percent certain of this:
St. Cloud Golf Club was situated near the western edge of the city, near its border with Waite Park and not far north of Division Street. Best guess here and from the researchers is that the course opened near the intersection of 3rd Street North and 37th Avenue, not far from what is now BBC Park, and worked northward, eventually crossing the railroad tracks and probably onto land that is now part of the Electrolux Home Products plant.
Supporting evidence: 1) The reference to “the ball park” in the Daily Times story most likely refers to a baseball stadium in that part of town that underwent improvements in 1911 and 1925. A 1938 aerial photo of the area confirms a baseball park in that area; I have not been able to confirm whether it was St. Cloud’s primary baseball park at the time, but indications are that it was. 2) The reference to “two railroad tracks are crossed here” makes sense because of the two sets of tracks in that area (not to mention an older, out-of-service split and set of tracks just south of the in-service tracks). Also, an entry on St. Cloud Golf Club in the Harper’s Official Golf Guide of 1901 reported that the course was “one half-mile from Great Northern Railroad station, and accessible by street cars.”
Presumed area of the defunct St. Cloud Golf Club, taken from a 1938 aerial photo through the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. Near the bottom-right corner of the photo is a baseball stadium, at or close to the golf course’s presumed starting point, and near the top are the railroad tracks that golfers are presumed to have crossed. Minnesota Highway 15 and part of the city of Waite Park are on the left side of the photo.BBC Park in St. Cloud, near the presumed starting point of St. Cloud Golf Club. (Joe Bissen photo)
More than a century after St. Cloud Golf Club’s demise, it is impossible to determine anything about its character by scanning what is now flat, urban land. But perhaps a hint can be found in a post on a Northwest Hickory Players blog. In a reprinted interview with golf historian and Foulis expert Jim Healey, Healey described his impression of a typical Foulis course (note that Robert Foulis’ brothers James and David also were course architects):
“Typical of the day, their courses featured the traditional style of that era; namely medium to small greens, teeing areas quite close to previous greens, bunkers that fell into two categories, greenside bunkers with flat bottoms and cross-bunkers featuring tall mounding facing the player and sand on the opposite side.”
The Foulis brothers, from left, Robert, James and David (Wikimedia.org photo)
I don’t know how long St. Cloud Golf Club operated, though I’m thinking 1905 is a number that makes sense. A 1901 Minneapolis Journal story notes that St. Cloud golfers would meet with those of Grand Forks, Fargo, Jamestown, Winnipeg and Duluth to organize the Northwestern Golf Association. Newspaper reports show that St. Cloud competed against Bryn Mawr in inter-club competitions in 1902. In July 1903, a Minneapolis Journal story reported that St. Cloud would be among the new clubs with competitors in the state tournament — but a story in August 1903 from the same newspaper said that St. Cloud was not a Minnesota Golf Association member. An MGA all-time membership roll from 1920 does not list St. Cloud Golf Club as ever holding membership.
A 1904-05 St. Cloud city directory lists St. Cloud Golf Club, with E.H. Hill as president and H.C. Ervin as secretary-treasurer. (Harry Ervin also was secretary-treasurer of the Tileston Milling Company.) But I could not find St. Cloud Golf Club in any newspaper mentions after 1903, and it was not mentioned in a 1910 city directory. The presumption is that the Country Club took up the torch for St. Cloud golf nine years later.
Next: One of the St. Cloud area’s lost almost-courses.
For a place so unassuming, the lost golf course at Gonvick did have its moments.
I never said they were momentous. I said only that they were moments.
The lost golf course with the prophetic name — Lost River Golf Course — was established shortly before 1960, according to the admittedly sketchy information I could come up with — one or two word-of-mouth accounts, nothing that I could find in black and white. The course was south of downtown Gonvick, a north-central Minnesota city of 282, and immediately south of Minnesota Highway 92, which cuts diagonally through the city. Just to the south of the lost-course grounds flows the Lost River, so named, it is said, because it once passed under a bog until the bogs were drained.
There was nothing assuming about Lost River Golf Course. It was a small, public nine-holer, so devoid of frills that one paid greens fees at a gas station just off the highway and then went off to play. The routing essentially consisted of seven par-3 holes that ringed two par-4s.
Still, even in a city whose population has never exceeded 375, Gonvick deserves kudos for carrying a golf course through approximately four decades. Lost River was said to have lasted until close to 2000 — again, I could never pin down an exact closing date, with at least a half-dozen sources differing on whether it made it into the 21st century.
“It was a shorter course, but people in the area did support it,” said Rick Fischer, who played Lost River as a youth in the early 1970s and who eventually went on to become the activities director at Sauk Centre High School. Fischer remembered that a drive-in, like the gas station basically adjacent to the golf course, served as the clubhouse, and Corinne Richards, editor of The Leader-Record newspaper of Gonvick and Clearbrook, remembered that patrons would bring side dishes to the drive-in for club events.
Richards also remembered Lost River Golf Course’s brush with international recognition. (It’s true, but I suppose I should issue a hyperbole alert.)
“We had an exchange student from Norway who played the course,” Richards said. When the student returned to his homeland, Richards added, he gained playing privileges at European courses by showing his Lost River membership card.
Fischer also remembered a kid from up the road in Bemidji sweeping into town in the early 1970s and taking the golf course by storm. The kid’s name was Bill Israelson, and Fischer recalled that “Izzy” was probably 12 or 13 years old and barefoot when he came down to Gonvick and won the Lost River shortstop.
That is confirmed, and double confirmed.
“Billy Israelson burned up the Gonvick course to repeat as champion” of the shortstop, the Bemidji Pioneer reported on Aug. 21, 1972, noting that Israelson’s winning score was 3 under par.
Israelson, who went on to win three Minnesota State Amateur championships and played on the PGA Tour, even briefly leading the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, confirms the story.
“True,” Israelson, now the professional at The Vintage in Staples, wrote in a Facebook post. “I had won the junior flight the previous two years, so the tournament chairman said I had to play in the men’s championship. I beat my neighbor and defending champ in a playoff after shooting 1 over par for 27 holes. The Gonvick golf course had sand greens. And I had 28 putts for the 27 holes!!”
That’s not all.
“I also met my future wife, Sarah Daman, age 9, and beat her dad Jim who was also playing in champ flight!!”
And about those greens. Lost River likely was among the last half-dozen golf courses in Minnesota with sand greens, which once served to throw an out-of-towner for a loop.
“”We had a salesman who would come by,” said Richards, “and say, why are there flags in the sand traps? The answer was, they weren’t in the sand traps — they were in the greens.”
Lost River Golf Course in Gonvick, 1960 aerial photo. Downtown Gonvick is at the top-right of the photo; the golf course is in the open area just to the south of Minnesota 92. Sand greens are visible in the form of small circles. Photo from John Borchert University of Minnesota Map Library and Minnesota DNR Landview service. Later photos available at HistoricAerials.com show greater detail but won’t be published here because they would throw my operating budget of zero dollars and zero cents way out of whack.
OKLEE
Twenty miles northwest of Gonvick, crossing a couple of county lines from Clearwater to Polk to Red Lake, lies the city of Oklee, where the lost-course tale has similarities to the aforementioned Lost River course.
Both courses were small-town — Oklee’s estimated population is 418, having peaked from the low 500s from the 1960s through the 1980s, more or less the heyday of the Oklee golf course, which likely was in operation from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s.
A smattering of clips from the Oklee Herald provided sketchy details. The earliest I found was from April 1964, urging readers “Don’t Drive Vehicles to the Golf Course!” because the club’s sod had been cut up from previous excursions. A story from May 7, 1964, detailed the club’s spring meeting, which drew an attendance of 36 and at which a membership fee of $5 was set. That story also referenced tournaments that had been played the previous year, which makes 1963 the closest guess I can make as to the course’s founding.
In 1967, the officers included club president Don Fournier. Fees were $7.50 for an annual family season membership and 50 cents per round for public play. (Those are remarkably low fees, even for 50 years ago.)
Better than the Oklee Herald clips, though, a couple of townsfolk offered more information.
“Oklee is pretty flat, so there were no hills (on the golf course), but there were sand traps, I was told,” wrote Bonny Cote, editor of the Oklee Herald. “It was located on the south end of town and today is the home of many houses and a few apartment buildings … also a City Park with picnic shelter, tennis and volleyball courts.”
Cote said she had an uncle who built the first apartment buildings on the grounds of the abandoned course in 1977.
Cote then referred me to Oklee resident Bob Melby, who offered even more salient memories.
The course, Melby wrote in an email, “was planned by a group of local businessmen and owned by the city of Oklee. The local dentist, Dr. Harold Lindquist, was one of if not the lead person. It operated until the mid 1970s at which time it was developed for housing.
“It was a five hole course with sand greens. To play nine holes you replayed holes 1, 2 & 3 and then went from hole 3 to hole 5 for hole 9. Annual fees were 7.50 and daily green fees of .50. It was on an honor system as there was no management staff, although they hired a person to mow the grass. A wooden lock box at the first tee was where you would pay.
“In the first few years a slice on holes 1 or 5 would put you on the local High School football field and a hook on hole 4 put you among grain bins. I played some golf there in my teens to early 20s but I wasn’t involved in the operation.”
Teachers Mr. Nordquist, Mr. Hietala and Mr. Arzdorf at the Oklee golf course, circa 1966.Aerial photo of Oklee in 1984. In the lower part of the photo with the large open area with just a few homes and apartment buildings is where the golf course course was. Photos courtesy of Oklee Historical Society.
CLEARBROOK
If the lost courses at Gonvick and Oklee were tough nuts to crack — I made at least 25 phone calls just to come up with the sketchy information presented above — the lost course at Clearbrook, or at least the likelihood of one, was tougher than a double-thick macadamia shell sealed with Krazy Glue.
Despite many inquiries, I never did definitively determine whether there once was a golf course in Clearbrook, the next town down Highway 92 southeast of Gonvick.
But I think there probably was.
I came across multiple references to a Clearbrook golf club having participated in Central Minnesota Golf Association and Red River Valley tournaments — in 1930, 1932, 1933 and 1934 — and of Clearbrook golfers playing in tournaments in 1931 in Bemidji (the Birchmont), and other courses in 1930, ’33 and ’34. The most accomplished appeared to be one Wayne Randall, who advanced to the semifinals of a Central Minnesota tournament in 1934 before losing 2 and 1 to D.N. Tallman of Willmar, a former Minnesota Golf Association president and now, posthumously, a member of the MGA Hall of Fame.
Eyeballing aerial photos of the Clearbrook area from 1939, the earliest readily available, revealed nothing that definitely looked like a golf course, extant or abandoned. But the preponderance of mentions in old newspapers establishes, in my mind, that there once was a golf course in Clearbrook.
As always, information or opinions on any of these places are most welcome.
William Lovekin, long-deceased and itinerant Midwestern golf professional, built himself a solid résumé: accomplished player, longtime teacher and one-time (at least) course designer.
It also was said of Lovekin that he was well-schooled on golf club design. I have little doubt that’s true. In that regard, however, I would submit he can’t be considered a visionary.
Asterisk: small sample size.
The name of W.R. (William) Lovekin, better known as “Bim,” is referenced in many old publications, and even a handful of modern ones. But the only one that I know of that reveals Lovekin’s character in any depth appeared in the May 14, 1932, edition of the Minneapolis Tribune. Keep in mind that Lovekin designed and built golf clubs with hickory shafts:
“There is a steady return to wooden-shafted irons throughout the country if Bim Lovekin, popular professional at Golden Valley, knows his clubs and golf, and he has a reputation for both,” the Tribune story began. “During the first Minneapolis league match last Wednesday at Golden Valley, Bim discoursed at length on the movement back to the hickory.
” ‘It is significant and pertinent to note that both Walter Hagen and Horton Smith have returned to wooden-shafted irons and are pushing them,’ offered Lovekin. ‘It is also to be observed that fully 60 per cent of the outstanding players throughout the country have been going the same way.
” ‘The general opinion is that irons with iron shafts were pretty much of a fad, but they have outlived much of their usefulness. …’ ”
Bim wasn’t exactly prescient on this one. Hickory-shafted irons (yes, an oxymoron, like metal woods) went the way of the horseless carriage, while steel became the shaft of choice.
The effort here is not to tarnish Bim Lovekin’s reputation, for we all have at some point supported bass-ackward notions, haven’t we? The anecdote is offered only as a small window into golf’s past.
Back to Bim Lovekin. Nine months prior, he had ventured 155 miles west of Golden Valley to Minneota, a Lyon County city of just over 900 residents, some of whom were expressing an interest in organizing a golf club and building a golf course.
Minneota Golf Club was established in late July 1931, with the Minneota Mascot reporting on July 31 of that year that the group, with Dr. R.J. Lundgren as president, was set to begin work on a 55-acre plot three miles south of downtown. The land, just west of the Hemnes church, was owned by Hans Teigland, where, according to the Mascot, “a very sporty course can be laid out there without much trouble.”
That’s where Lovekin came in. He surveyed Teigland’s property and laid out nine holes covering 2,767 yards, with a par of 35.
He also agreed with, or maybe even fostered, the Mascot’s assessment of the new golf course.
” ‘It is a mighty sporty course,’ Mr. Lovekin said, ‘and it’s one where good shots will be rewarded and bad ones penalized. There are natural hazards in abundance, and it’s a course you won’t get tired of playing.’ ”
1938 aerial photo of presumed site of Minneota Golf Club. Golf course site would have been on the left side of this photo, with County Highway 3 running north-south on the right side and the south branch of the Yellow Medicine River farther right (east). Best guess is that routings of many holes roughly followed the ravine that ran through the course. University of Minnesota John Borchert Map Library photo.Current photo, with Minneota at top and approximate area of golf course in maroon rectangle. (USGS)
It’s worth noting that Lovekin likely had a handle on what constituted a good golf course. He had played around the Midwest, and the Golden Valley Golf and Country Club that employed him had its course designed by famed course architect A.W. Tillinghast.
The first tee at Minneota Golf Club was at the southeastern edge of the course, where players embarked on a 452-yard par 5. The course also included six par 4s, ranging in length from 285 to 440 yards, and two par 3s of 150 and 155 yards.
The course featured willow trees, hills and four crossings of a ravine. Three of the holes were doglegs. “Those who traversed the course predict that a lot of balls are likely to be lost through the fence when short-cuts are attempted,” the Mascot reported.
Charter members of Minneota Golf Club paid dues of $10. The Mascot reported by way of comparison that Lovekin’s Golden Valley club charged dues of $110 and an annual membership fee of $400.
At Minneota Golf Club’s outset, no greens fees were charged. “Expenses are being kept to the minimum in launching the course here,” the Mascot reported, “and the intention is that people who have not played golf before be given an opportunity to do so at no cost whatever in order to stimulate interest in the game. An ideal course can be arranged within the next few years, but for a ‘starter’ only the simplest of preparations will be under taken.”
Minneota Golf Club did not last forever. My best guess is that, like three other lost courses in Lyon County — at Russell, Cottonwood and Tracy — it was abandoned by the early 1940s, which would match the timeline for many other lost courses in southwestern Minnesota. A 1932 Minneapolis Tribune ad from Minneota GC solicited purchase of a mower. An April 1936 entry in the Minneota Mascot referenced the club, with Dr. C.E. Eastwood as president and Carl Strand as secretary. I found no later references to the club. Golf in Minneota reappeared in 1964 with the opening of Countryside Golf Club, on the western edge of the city.
More of Lovekin’s story deserves to be told. The native Scotsman’s bio included stops at no fewer than eight clubs: Rockford, Ill. (1906), Woodmont of Milwaukee (1907-14), Fox River of Green Bay, Wis. (1921-26), Ozaukee of Milwaukee (1925), Golden Valley (1928-36), Montevideo (1937-38), New Ulm (1939) and Worthington, where he was employed until his death in 1952.
Lovekin had the unusual distinction of playing in two U.S. Opens 24 years apart — in 1906 and 1930 — and won the 1922 Wisconsin State Open. A 1972 column in the Argus-Leader of Sioux Falls, S.D., reported that Lovekin had been among the professionals at Worthington who had worked with an up-and-coming player named Joel Goldstrand, who would matriculate to the University of Houston, then the PGA Tour, then a career as Minnesota’s most prolific golf course designer, with around 50 courses to his credit, most of them in Minnesota.
Lovekin, meanwhile, was credited with having designed 18 other courses as of the 1931 Mascot story. I haven’t run across any other mentions of courses he designed, but regardless, he did leave a mark on the state’s golf history.
In southwestern Minnesota lies some of the most fertile ground in the state.
For lost golf courses.
Chapter 42 of “Fore! Gone.” was titled “Silos and Flagsticks.” It offered a tip of the Northrup King cap not only to the rich loam of the southwestern corner of the state but to eight small towns that were — are, actually — home to at least 10 abandoned golf courses.
Those 10 — in Chandler, Fulda, Heron Lake, Jackson, Lakefield, Tracy, Windom, and three in Pipestone — might not have been the half of it.
In an area roughly from Ortonville to Granite Falls to Mankato and all points south and west, I have so far identified 15 lost golf courses. I suspect there are twice as many. Their life spans are distinctly similar — almost all were founded in the 1920s, when times were good across small-town Minnesota and the economies hummed along like well-oiled combine harvesters, but were abandoned in the late 1930s or early 1940s, casualties of the Great Depression and/or the advent of World War II, when many of the male residents left town to fight overseas and many of the female residents were preoccupied with raising families or helping domestically with the war effort.
Information on these courses often is spotty, but in the coming weeks (OK, probably months; I don’t work as fast as I used to) I will be writing about dozens more lost golf courses that have revealed themselves. A good share of them make their eternal rest in the land of silos and flagsticks.
For starters, a trip far west, nearly to the South Dakota border …
LAKE BENTON GOLF CLUB
Eight miles east of the Minnesota-South Dakota state line lies downtown Lake Benton. The city was the seat of Lincoln County from 1882-1902, and like a number of other small towns in that neck of the pheasant fields, it featured a population healthy and large enough to take a run at golf in the 1920s. Lake Benton’s population peaked in the first half of the 1900s — it was 944 in 1920, 903 in 1930 and 961 in 1940. Today, it is estimated to be in the mid-600s.
By 1924, according to an estimate from the Lincoln County Historical Society, a golf club had formed and established a nine-hole, sand-greens layout a half-mile east of downtown, in what is now a mostly open area bordered by Minnesota 14 on the south, Lakeview Drive on the west, railroad tracks on the north (the course did not go as far north as the lakeshore) and Benton Street on the east. The historical society said the course was owned by the city of Lake Benton. A 1925 story in the Lake Benton News affirms that the course was established in 1924, as it reports that “last year was the initial year” of the club.
The course, wrote the historical society’s Anne Lichtsinn in an email, had “grass that got so long that balls would get lost and then you had to go home.”
In 1926, the Minneapolis Tribune reported on misfortune at the Lake Benton course in a story headlined “Foursome Halted When Visiting Golfer Breaks Leg Swinging at Ball”:
“Ivanhoe, Minn., Sept. 17 — George Graff, cashier of the First National Bank of this city, will long remember his first trip to the Lake Benton golf course.
“Graff had never played the course and with a few friends decided to make the trip and play a round.
“When the foursome had played a couple of holes, Graff took a vicious drive at the ball — and he broke his leg.”
In 1930, another outsider visited Lake Benton in a trip that had a less calamitous conclusion.
“Mr. Frank Broki of Minneapolis, a professional golfer and instructor, was in Lake Benton on Wednesday of this week and gave lessons to a number of Lake Benton golf fans,” reads a passage from a reprint of a story in the Aug. 1, 1930, Lake Benton News. “Mr. Broki played one round on our course in a foursome comprised of some of our best players and made nine holes in 34, 32 being par. On account of the extreme unevenness of the course and the multiplicity of natural hazards, it is considered a very difficult one and to make it in 34 the first time is considered remarkable.”
Broki Brokl was something of a Johnny Appleseed of small-town Minnesota golf. He won state public links championships in 1927 and 1928 and the State Amateur championship in 1929 before turning professional. A Minneapolis Tribune story from 1932 reported that Broki Brokl “now is what could be called a ‘circuit rider,’ teaching and spreading the gospel of better golf on a circuit that takes him around three states (Minnesota, South Dakota and Iowa). … He makes four trips around the two circuits each season spending several days to a week giving individual instructions to club members.”
(Correction, November 2017: The Minneapolis golfer’s name was spelled Brokl.)
Lichtsinn was unaware of the circumstances of the Lake Benton golf course’s demise, noting only that “it may have died out in the depression and drought at that time.” My best guess is that that is partly true. In fact, the course survived at least through the late 1930s.
The Lake Benton News of Aug. 23, 1932, reported on election of officers at the golf club, with H.H. Evans elected as president. The club appeared to be something of a regional hub for golf: Enrollment consisted of 27 members from Tyler, 17 from Ivanhoe, 13 from Lake Benton, three each from Arco and Hendricks, and two from Ruthton.
1938 aerial photo, Lake Benton golf course. The city of Lake Benton is to the left, the lake is at the top, and Minnesota Highway 14 runs along the south side of the course. The holes on the golf course are clearly visible at the center and right portions of the photo, with the sand greens showing as small, dark circles. (University of Minnesota John Borchert Library photo)
In June 1938, a tournament was held at the course, the newspaper reported. “The course this year is in the finest shape it has ever been,” the story noted. “Entry fees are $1, and ham, bacon and golf balls will be awarded as prizes.”
The next week’s follow-up to that story referred to the “Lake Benton-Tyler golf course” and noted “raspberries to losers” in tournament play. It is presumed those were literal fruity raspberries, not the kind emitted by placing one’s tongue between the lips and emitting a sputtering sound.
Another tournament was held later in June 1938, with the newspaper referencing another name for Lake Benton’s course. “Paired with Martin ‘Dietz’ Griedzicki, of the Ivanhoe course, Jens Bolleson of the Ben-Ti golf club, blazed away on the local links.” Bolleson shot 38-36–74 and won a ham, with 20 players entered in the event.
A Lake Benton news clip from June 16, 1939, referred to the course as “Ben-Tye golf links.”
And then … nothing.
I found no further references to golf in Lake Benton in scanning microfilm of the Lake Benton News from 1939 and 1940 and then as late as 1946 (a few Minnesota courses shut down during World War II, then resumed operations later). Perhaps telling, and this is pure speculation, is a reference in the July 7, 1939, Lake Benton News to a “grasshopper scourge” in nearby Ivanhoe. Perhaps there were residual effects in Lake Benton that imperiled the course. Perhaps the golf club had just, seriously no pun intended, run its course.
In July 1940, a new bowling alley, named Paul’s, opened in Lake Benton. The Lake Benton News covered local baseball at length and included stories on other sports, including auto racing. But the only reference to golf that I found in looking through much of the year’s newspaper archives was to more misfortune, albeit less severe, at a golf course to the north.
W.A. Little, the newspaper reported, fell into a pond at a golf course in Alexandria, pulling his caddie along with him into the drink when the two could not successfully negotiate the bank of the pond.
Author’s notes: The Lake Benton golf course marks the 150th that I have identified in Minnesota. When I started this lost-course project in 2012, I soon suspected I might find as many as 70 lost courses in the state. Then I realized there might be a hundred. As more abandoned courses revealed themselves and as more modern courses folded, I realized there might be 150. Now that I have reached that mark and know of at least 20 more, I have no doubt there are more than 200 lost courses scattered throughout the state. I’ll never find them all. But if you’re out there, deceased host of the game, I’m trying to find you.
My apologies for not including a credit on the photo of the golf course at the start of this post. I received the image from a friend who doesn’t remember where the image came from. I would be glad to offer proper credit if the source is revealed.
