Tag Archives: Seth Raynor

St. Paul Mystery, I-A: The 2,000-member golf club that never was

Lost golf courses, ,

There is one curious sidebar to the early history of Lakeview-then-Hillcrest Golf Club. It concerns the notion that half of an entire neighborhood of St. Paul could have become golf course grounds.

Preposterous, right?

In the end, probably yes. But maybe, just maybe, not if Charles Gordon had had his way.

The year was 1921, the month December. It was shortly after — barring some all-time Month No. 12 heat wave that I don’t know about — Lakeview Golf & Country Club had concluded its first season of play on a thin, rectangular plot at the northeastern corner of St. Paul, in what is now known as the Hayden Heights neighborhood. (Lakeview would become known as Hillcrest in 1923. Photo at the top of this post shows Hillcrest, now a Minnesota lost golf course, at Larpenteur Avenue in April 2019.)

If a two-paragraph entry in the Dec. 30 Minneapolis Star is to be believed, someone had bigger plans for the neighborhood than a mere 18-holer.

“New Club for St. Paul,” read a sub-headline on a longer story.

“A new golf club is planned for St. Paul which probably will be one of the largest in the northwest,” the entry began. “The club will have over 2,000 members and will be a 36-hole course.

“C.W. Gordon of the Somerset club is one of the principal backers. The club will be for the salaried men and the annual dues will be $25. C. Raynor will be employed as architect. The course will be built on the tracts of land near the Lakeview Club.”

Well, knock me over with a featherie.

Where do I start?

A) I never heard of such a thing.

B) Two thousand members? (Yes, the story read 2,000, not some other number.) That is preposterous on its face, even knowing that in 1921 golf in Minnesota and the Twin Cities was entering a decade of tremendous growth.

C) Thirty-six holes, with 18 in the neighborhood having been dedicated just months before? Seems unlikely, and I’ll get to more of that.

D) Did someone say Raynor?

There is this, in defense of the Star story: C.W. Gordon was a man of considerable means, so the idea that he had grand plans should come as no surprise.

Charles William Gordon was president of Gordon & Ferguson, a St. Paul clothing manufacturer and wholesaler. His family lived at 378 Summit Avenue and was well connected in business and sporting circles, tied to The Minikahda Club, Town & Country Club and then the patrician Somerset Country Club in Mendota Heights, of which Gordon was a principal founder in 1919. Gordon was so well connected, in fact, that he served as a pallbearer  at the 1916 funeral of St. Paul railroad and banking magnate James J. Hill.

Gordon helped establish Somerset in part because he believed Town & Country Club had become overly congested, Rick Shefchik wrote in his classic Minnesota golf book “From Fields to Fairways.” Perhaps that same notion led Gordon to believe there was a similar opportunity in St. Paul’s northeast, where Lakeview/Hillcrest was founded in part as a response to perceived overcrowding at nearby Phalen Park Golf Course, established in 1917.

Still, it’s a stretch to think that area could have reasonably accommodated 36 more holes of golf. After all, even as early as 1921, three other clubs — Phalen, Lakeview and Northwood Country Club in North St. Paul — were already operating within five miles of the 36-hole site proposed by Gordon.

If you ask me, and I know you didn’t but I’m going to tell you anyway, I don’t see how 36 more holes would have fit into this area. (I’m operating under the assumption that the Star story referred to property only in St. Paul and not adjacent Oakdale or then-New Canada townships.) Here’s a 1916 plat map, closest to 1921 I could find:

Hayden Heights area of St. Paul, 1916 plat map. Much of the area was referred to as Furness’ Garden Lots. The diagonal road near the top-left corner represents the streetcar line that would have taken golfers to Lakeview/Hillcrest and presumably to Charles Gordon’s proposed 36-hole course. Area inside thin green line is what would become Lakeview/Hillcrest Golf Club in 1921. Plat map shows only a handful of structures in this entire area in 1916, but 36 more holes of golf there seems implausible. Plat map courtesy of University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Library.

After all that, here, at least if you are interested in golf history, is the most curious sentence in the Minneapolis Star report: “C. Raynor will be employed as architect.”

C. Raynor? No, frankly, I don’t see that.

The “C” most certainly was a typographical error, and the Raynor reference should have been to “S.,” or “Seth,” or “nationally renowned golf course architect Seth Raynor.” There was in fact a direct connection between Seth Raynor and Charles Gordon. Raynor was the architect hired by Gordon and other Somerset members to design their Mendota Heights Club in 1919, and while in Minnesota during that time period, Raynor also designed Midland Hills in Rose Township (now Roseville), which opened for play in July 1921.

But I know of no connection between Raynor and a proposed golf course in northeastern St. Paul, and none of a handful of informed golf-history sources I talked with knew of one, either.

My bottom line, I guess, is that all of this is a certain amount of ado about nothing. I’m thinking Mr. Charles W. Gordon concocted some sort of brilliant-in-his-head plan in 1921, fed it to a Minneapolis reporter late that year, and that nothing tangible ever became of 36 holes and 2,000 members and Seth Raynor in Hayden Heights.

But it’s interesting to imagine.

Thanks to Minnesota History Center oral historian Ryan Barland for digging up the Minneapolis Star story on Gordon and golf.

Midland Hills: More from the drop ceiling

Golf history,

When I interviewed Midland Hills Country Club course superintendent Mike Manthey in mid-March for my St. Paul Pioneer Press story about the historic find in the drop ceiling, I quickly realized I was not only onto a singular tale but was talking with someone keenly familiar with the history and workings of classic golf architecture.

Inside page from St. Paul Pioneer Press sports section of April 29, 2018, showing photos from the current Midland Hills Country Club and photos from the recently discovered original blueprint of Seth Raynor’s planned layout for the course. (Photos for Pioneer Press courtesy of Midland Hills)

That made the conversation all the more compelling to me. Classic golf design is a particular interest of mine — it isn’t No. 1 on my list but is sort of a 1AAAAAA golf interest next to my admittedly peculiar fascination with Minnesota’s lost golf courses — and it was clear Manthey knew his stuff.

I follow on Twitter a handful of sharp knives, local and national, who tweet about golf architecture and course maintenance, both classic and modern. A few of my favorites are Bill Larson at Town & Country Club, Chris Tritabaugh at Hazeltine, Gary Deters at St. Cloud Country Club and, nationally, Anthony Pioppi, whose prolific pen has covered subjects including the history of Minikahda Golf Club.

And now, Manthey. The Faribault, Minn., native and former course superintendent at the A.W. Tillinghast-designed Golden Valley Golf Club, Manthey is not only a good Twitter follow, his Midland Hills Turf Blog is revelatory for both its coverage of the renovation/restoration that’s in store for Seth Raynor-designed Midland Hills and for its insight on classic golf course architecture.

I saved a few outtakes from my conversation with Manthey. Didn’t work them into my Pioneer Press story because I was already treading on thin newsprint ice over the length of what did make it into the paper. My questions, paraphrased or conversely put into long form, are in bold.

Meh. Capital M, capital E, capital H. (Me being facetious.) Why should anyone who isn’t a paid Midland Hills member care about the discovery — a blueprint of original plans for Raynor’s MH layout and its irrigation system?

Manthey: “It is a significant find not just for Midland Hills but for architecture and for Seth Raynor (historians). … It directly ties the Seth Raynor heritage to Midland Hills forever. We knew we had that connection to Seth Raynor, which is significant in the architectural world, but we never had anything physical. We always thought … everything was just lost over time. A lot of clubs have a lot of historical photos and documentation, but not many have the original drawings, or a copy of them.”

How closely will the Raynor blueprint be followed in the impending renovation/restoration of Midland Hills led by Raynor expert Jim Urbina?

Manthey: “How much of that map will be restored, that’s hard to say. Golf courses evolve way more than people realize, because when you play a golf course daily, year after year, you don’t see that change because it happens so gradually. It’s a living, breatihng thing, and it moves. So some of these (course features) have changed so much that I don’t know if we’re really capable of getting them all back, but for us to be able to give (Urbina) that original drawing, it expands his creativity corridor exponentially. It’s quite rare.”

Most notable, in my mind, were Manthey’s ruminations on the evolution of golf and golf courses since famed architects like Raynor plied their craft in the 1920s and ’30s.

What’s to be gained from a restoration of a classically designed golf course?

Manthey: “We do know that classic architecture, whether It was Raynor or (Alister) MacKenzie or (Donald) Ross, their strategy was created off of angles, angles of play, so they gave you a lot of width off the tee, and that width created playability, but then the angles created the strategy.

“If the fairways were almost twice as wide as they are now, the balls would roll and create an angle that was extremely difficult into the green.  Over time, with the planting of trees in the ’50s and the corridors shrinking and fairways shrinking, now the ball doesn’t go that far off line. So those angles are reduced. So the golf course almost becomes more one-dimensional. You can only play it down the middle. Well, we don’t really understand that game of angles anymore because it’s not very common in golf.

“If you look at the top golf courses in the country, a lot of them have been restored. A lot of what’s been restored is widening out those corridors and re-creating those angles into the greens, which was the original architecture.

“People are learning more about the history of their golf courses and wanting that original strategy back.”