Looking For Old Photos Of Land Leveling Operations

[Bradley Anderson]

I am looking for photos of land leveling operations circa 1910 - 1930.

On older golf courses where the grades are uniform and smooth, there would have had to have been land leveling or floating of the surface to knock the bumps into the low spots.

I would love to have some photos of those operations because I think they were and are very important for drainage, and ultimately for a fast and firm conditions. If you don't knock down the summits of these small humps and hillocks that occur on natural grades, and drag them into the birdbaths that collect water, what you end up with is low spots that develop shallow rooted grasses, and those shallow rooted grasses, if they are widespread, can dictate your entire irigation schedule.

I am realizing that fast and firm on older golf courses is really a function of how well the course was originally graded for surface drainage. Wherever you have these pockets of ground that are depressed, the soil oxygen levels become depleted in the cooler months of the year and the deeper rooted f&f grasses yield to the shallow rooted weedy grasses, namely Poa annua. It's a loosing battle, especially when it's in the rough, because fescue and bluegrass do not have the tolerance for low oxygen levels that Poa annua has.

[Don_Mahaffey]

Bradley,
I’ll watch this thread with interest as my feeling on why older courses drain well is quite the opposite of your premise. That is, I’ve always thought that older courses drained well because the natural drainage wasn’t messed with, while you seem to be saying they drain well because they were smoothed out.

[Bradley Anderson]

Don,

If a golf course was built on a farmstead, it was almost certainly tiled in the low areas before it became a golf course. And on top of that, the golden age architects installed miles of drain tile in the golf course. I have a 1920's schematic of a tile system that Alison did in Chicago that is uincredible. That I can document.

What I am trying to document in addition to that is that the golden age architects also land leveled the surface grade before seeding so that the "natural" grade would not puddle or hold water in small birdbaths.

I have seen photos of a team of horses pulling a floating tool, and I have seen photos of steel wheeled tractors pulling a disc, but I have never seen photos of a grading type of machine for smoothing the surface grade.

[Don_Mahaffey]

Bradley,
I'm not trying to hijack your thread...I know your looking for photos.
But, it's news to me that all golden age courses started out with miles of drain tile, but I'm far from an expert on golden age golf construction. I don't doubt that some used tile, but you seem to be saying that miles of tile was the norm. I'd like to learn more about that.

What about courses not built on farm land?

[Bradley Anderson]

Don,

Sorry if I gave the impression that I thought you were hijacking the thread. You are not at all. Let me xplain further:

Natural grades are not golfable. If you venture of the trail into a prairie or a woodland, the ground is very irregular from the various forced of nature. For instance, when a tree tips over in the woods, it ussually leaves a significant hole in the ground after the stump rots away. Now think about what a golf landscape would look like after you have removed hundreds of trees with dynamite, and you have had dozens of men working for months on digging out boulders and rocks.

There is nothing natural about the finished grade of old golf courses. They were all graded at some point. Even if they had been farmed first, you would have to grade out the plow furrows. Certainly the true links courses where probably never graded, because the wind on the sand did the shaping. But on golf courses that were built on farm land or undeveloped virgin timber and swamps, there had to have been some kind of grading operations before the seed went down, to smooth the ground out.

I working on the theory that some architects spent more time on this motion than did others, and that this had a profound effect on the f&f capabilities of many golf courses. I would have better understanding of this issue if I could see photos, or hear reliable accounts of how this work was actually done.

[Jon Wiggett]

Bradley,

for F&F good drainage is important and as surface drainage is often the most effective then you are correct in your assumption but only some of the time. There are many courses which have limited surface drainage and indeed if the ground is free draining then you don't want the water flowing on the surface as this will slow the percolation rate of the water.

More important to F&F however is the grass type and of course the maintenance program. Get these wrong and no matter how well your course drains, surface or sub surface, you won't get F&F. The right maintenance program will however make up for a lot of deficiencies in other areas.

[Bradley Anderson]

Jon,

The only grass type I know of that thrives in low oxygen soils where water pools and stands over poorly surface drained ground is Poa annua, or bastard bent. Fescues and blues, and the new varieties of bent that all perform well under F&F conditions do not like wet feet for prolonged periods of time. Those grass types all like a balance of water and oxygen in the pore space of the soil.

I think that the best architects of the golden age knew that the best grasses with the deepest roots would flourish if they provided good surface, and subsurface drainage. And I believe they made it a priority to grade all of the birdbaths out of their golf courses before they seeded. I would just love to see a picture of the kind tools that were used to achieve that.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Road Grader, 1910

1905

[Scott Witter]

Bradley:

I am certainly going to defer to your expertise regarding the strengths and weaknesses of grass species and the conditions under which they do best, though I am not as convinced as to your reference about the amount of drainage or that the land was 'graded' as much as you think.  Without question, there were many ODG's that used plenty of drainage and a lot of it sometimes, but I too would be curious about how much they actually graded the surface to achieve what you are asking.

I believe this thread has the makings to be very interesting as the topic has soooo much to do with your premise about achieveable conditions and good grasses.

It will be interesting to see what Tom Doak and perhaps Jim Urbina might have to say in this regard, because if I am not mistaken, thay take great pains to protect as much of the 'natural' contour as possible.

"If a golf course was built on a farmstead, it was almost certainly tiled in the low areas before it became a golf course."

You are probably correct about this, but did the golf architects add more drainage in these instances and if it was farmland, wouldn't the surface already be fairly smooth with all of the humps and bumps and small low pockets knocked down and  filled in by the time they got there?

I agree with you that the low areas must have been filled in, but I would suspect very carefully, with small teams of mules and horses and relatively small impliments that really didn't disturb the soil structure much.

"I think that the best architects of the golden age knew that the best grasses with the deepest roots would flourish if they provided good surface, and subsurface drainage"

A really good point IMO and we know this from reading about many of the ODG's who had good experience with turf and turf management and understood well the consequences of their actions on the ground.

A great thread and I hope it gets much debate, but I have to leave for a movie with the family.

Scott

[Dick Kirkpatrick]

I think Scott Witter's post is almost bang on.
I have been building golf courses since 1957 so can not relate to what they were doing in the 30's, but because equipment did not change much from then until the 50's, I will make these comments.
Golf course construction in the early days was not much different than a farmer getting a field ready for seeding down for pasture. The only difference being the type of grass that would be sown. The same equipment was used: ploughs, cultivators, discs and harrows. When the ground was ploughed, it left "dead" furrows on the land, which can still be seen on many of the very old courses today, unless they have been regraded. The other implements, discs, cultivators and harrows all had a tendency to "smooth" the surface. Some of the early specifications from architects actually stated that the ground would be "cultivated" until an acceptable smooth surface was obtained.
 Cultipackers (from which the Brillion seeder evolved with the addition of a seedbox) were used to compact and further even out the surface.
These were the methods used when we were going to seed everything to bluegrass.
When we started installing irrigation and seeding down the fairways to bent grasses, we needed a smoother surface and then we made up "floats" usually made by tieing together with cables or chains multiple logs or old farm beams such as in the picture in Scott's post. The idea was really not to take off the high points and fill in the low points, the objective was to get a very smooth, firm seedbed.
When we knew we had a wet area or fairway which was usually a swale, a clay pipe drain or herringbone drain system would be installed. Otherwise, it was left the way nature made it.
The first time I remember actual fairway grading to drainage collection areas with catch basins was in the early 70's.
Much of the unique fairway undulations that the early courses exhibited have been lost because of modern grading techniques.

[Bradley Anderson]

Dirk,

I didn't think about the tine harrow. But now that you mention it, that might have been a fairly good tool for smoothing out irregularities that hold water on the surface.

On sawtooth contours you could probably hit the ridge line on a cross angle with the tine harrow. But I still see that as the poor-man's method that would only work under ideal circumstances.

Guys, I am sorry to be a pain in the a _ _ about this thread, but I think that on the really great old golf courses, there was a motion and a special tool for that last movement before the seed went down; it removed the birdbaths and left a suface that water would shed off of without puddling.

[Bradley Anderson]

On the only golf course that I ever built, we would go after a rain storm and flag the bird baths where the soil may have settled. If we were able to get to those spots ahead of seeding we would add soil, and hand rake with cheesebrough rakes, pushing backwards, not pulling the soil. But when you are on a time line you don't always get those spots. You come back to them latter and add surface risers.

But what do you do on an older golf course where large areas are holding water on the entire property, and they are all infested with poa annua? You can lay tile for years and years without making a dent on the problem.

I think you have to bite the bullet and regrade the surface.

[Scott Witter]

Dick:

Your mention of farm equipment is interesting....about 12 years ago I met a young man, not so young any more, who is a very talented shaper and builder and when we got talking about finishing I asked him what he liked to use.  Without hesitation, he answered that when he went from town to town in his travels he always looked for farm equipment.  Even though there was 'specialized' equipment for the industry, he felt the many choices in the ag industry gave as good if not better results in many instances.  As you say, seeders and many other new equipment has evolved from farming.

Another story, I built a course for/with a family who were once farmers.  They built the course esentially themselves except for the shaper noted above who did the greens, tees and bunkers.  The three brothers in the family were amazing and after talking with me and the shaper for a few days, they  turned around and built customized equipment for all the finishing work and while a bit sceptical at first, they blew me away with their skills and how well the tools worked.

From all this....the site was very good in many respects and we were careful not to disturb every square foot.   Their euipment was small scale and the tractors used were also small and didn't compact the soil like modern day equip.  We did fill in the low spots, but DID NOT cut down the neat bumps.  I determined that as long as they were not interfering with the natural drainage patterns, we left them alone.  Furthermore, the low spots that were on enough of a predominant slope we also left alone knowing they wouldn't hold water as long as the slope was sufficient.

"Guys, I am sorry to be a pain in the a _ _ about this thread, but I think that on the really great old golf courses, there was a motion and a special tool for that last movement before the seed went down"

Bradley--Your not a pain and I think you are right in many respects about old building techniques...not unlike how the smart, common sense farmers cared for their land, I don't think they were at all interested in having wet bird baths everywhere...at least not large ones.   But I still don't think this occured on the scale you think it did.  I believe it happened in a very practical manner, only working where they had to, and focused on the major features, such as the green sites.

I wonder if that ole codger agrarian T, Paul will speak up and offer some of his wisdom...this topic suits him well

[Jon Wiggett]

Bradley,

do you assume that all hollows are bird baths?

[Mike_Young]

Bradley,
What kind of weed do you smoke?
While some like Don will not profess to be an expert on golden age architecture.....I will claim to be an expert as to the type of BS that comes from what all these ODGs did.  We disagree on this "leveling" stuff.....now maybe you can get enough guys deciding that the ODG geniuses had all this figured out but I have seen many  old fairway surfaces that had a "patina" derived from the removal of stumps and creation of a "rumple" affect.  Most of these guys basically got some local farmers and put some stakes in the ground......anything we dream up past that has a little "hype" mixed in it. Grasses....come on..they didn't think that far ahead.   I think it is fair to say they relied on sheet drainage in most all cases.....
But from reading this thread...you know something about grass.....just be careful how you use it and how much you smoke at one time.

[Bradley Anderson]

Jon,

I am thinking of a depression that is 2 to 8 feet across, or of vary sizes, and two to 10 inches deeper than the ground around it. When it rains this area holds water until it evaporates or percolates into the soil. In the winter months the percolation rates are slower because of frozen or semi frozen soils.

[Tony_Muldoon]

Bradley you were asking for photo's.

Here’s preparation for Colt's St Georges Hill in 1912 or thereabouts


The must have smoothed out those areas to get today’s fairways.

If you can find a copy of his "Some Essays" there is a picture of a horse and scraper building up the back of a bunker.  From approx 1906 he worked with the company Shanks - who provided powered machinery primarily Grass cutting. And from a couple of years after that he worked closely with Suttons Seeds who supplied agronomic advice and grass seeds.

Please don’t be defensive and keep asking questions as you see it.  Hopefully this helps.

[Jon Wiggett]

Bradley,

I think you over estimate the use of surface drainage in the past. It is my impression that many GAs tried to prevent surface water coming on to the green but were less concerned with the fairway areas.

If one of my aims is to get deep roots then I would want the water to come to a stand still and perculate into the ground rather than flow off once the top inch was moist. Not to have this is only going to lead to shallow rooting. Deep drainage is always going to be superior to surface drainage in regards to encouraging moisture at a lower depth. The challange for the Super is how to ensure that the water can perculate from the surface to the drainage.

Surface drainage is desirable to deal with flash flooding maybe and courses built very close (2-3ft) to the water table.

Humps AND hollows are part of what make the game so interesting.

I seem to remember a thread here about building a bunker using a horse drawn scoop a few years back, or maybe that was on another site?