[Mike_Cirba]

As we try to determine when courses became Great, I thought it might be useful to name every course in the US that was of architectural merit prior to 1910.

On a similar topic. What had any of the later prominent architects like Travis, Ross, + Emmett designed of notable repute at that time?

[John_Conley]

Mike, I'm interested in knowing if the courses people thought were best in 1910 align with the ratings in 2008 of courses designed before 1910.  Heck, wasn't Crystal Downs unranked by the two major golf publications 20 years ago?

[Dan Herrmann]

Mike - I think it'd be good to include Canada.  After all, isn't Royal Montreal the oldest golf club in North America?

[Mike_Cirba]

It was a very interesting time, as the Haskell ball had outmoded almost all of the very early courses and agronomics for good inland golf was still in its infancy.

[rjsimper]

Ekwanok

[Joe Bausch]

Garden City (1901, Emmett)?

[Powell Arms]

Philly Cricket, St Martin's course, hosted the US Open in 1907 and 1910.  I wouldn't call it a great architectural achievement, and articles didnt gush over the course after the 1907.  The USGA still came back three years later (and the remaining nine holes are still fun today)

Before WWI, Myopia Hunt hosted 4 US Opens and Chicago hosted three - would think they belong on the list.

[Dan Herrmann]

Newport?

[ChipOat]

Was the old Chicago GC any good?  How about Myopia Hunt Club?  The original Atlantic City CC?  I have Geoff Shack's 2 books around here, someplace.

Perhaps Mike's real question is:  WERE THERE any good golf courses in these parts pre-NGLA??  That's a good question.

[Kirk Gill]

Here's a contemporary account by H.J. Whigham, from his article "The Ideal Golf Course" published in the May, 1909 edition of Scribner's:

Ninety per cent of the courses in this country are not to be compared with the real golf links abroad. And the worst of it is that an entirely erroneous standard has grown up so that it is the most difficult thing in the world to introduce reforms. Everything now is sacrificed to the older players who want the path made easy for them, and for some strange reason the younger players are dumb. There are a few golfers in the country who have steadily set themselves to keep up the real standard, like Mr. Herbert Leeds, who, I believe was responsible not only for Myopia but for the nine-hole course at Bar Harbor, and the winter course at Aiken. There is an excellent inland course also at Manchester, Vermont, and there is Garden City, which lately has been much improved. When one has mentioned these one has included practically all the links in the country which approach in interest and quality the best courses abroad, and even these fall a long way short of perfection. Is it no strange that with all the vast sums of money expended on golf links in America, so few courses should be nearly good?

The defects in most courses I should attribute to two reasons. First of all, since money is an essential, the affairs of the different clubs are generally in the hand of the older men who supply the funds. The older men not only want things made easy for them, but they lack the imagination of youth. The Wheaton and Onwentsia courses in Chicago were the two best in the country when they were laid out, because they represented the last word in making artificial courses at that time.

But positively no advance has been made since then; in fact, if anything they have gone backward, because as the turf has improved, both courses have become far too easy. Their main difficulty in summer is the long grass, which is the worst feature of the game in America. Take Garden City as another example. Here conditions are most favorable and no one can doubt that with the Long Island soil and climate a really interesting course might be constructed. As it is, nearly everything is either wrong about the course or else not quite right where it could so easily be right. Walter Travis did a great deal when he put in about fifty new bunkers and imitated the eleventh hole as St. Andrews on the last green. That one change in itself has been a tremendous improvement. Yet he had to risk any amount of hostile criticism, and even now the course is hardly within measurable distance of what it ought to be if properly laid out.

Garden City, Myopia and Onswentsia are well known, and on Ian Andrews' writeup about Leeds he mentiones Kebo Valley and Palmetto, which must be the other two courses that Whigham references in Bar Harbor and Aiken. Ekwanok, I'm assuming, in Manchester, and Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton. Most of these courses have already been mentioned on this thread.

[mark chalfant]

Perhaps Whitemarsh Valley, Essex  County  (MA) or Huntington  CC  (NY)

[Mike_Cirba]

Powell,

It just occurred to me how ironic it was that Tillinghast and others regularly bemoaned Philadelphia's lack of a true "Championship course" for grooming local players, while the original Philadelphia Cricket Club hosted the US Open in 1907 and 1910!    

It's especially ironic when you consider that Tillinghast was a member there!

In fact, in reading the local accounts from those years, prior to the creation of Merion, the original Huntingdon Valley course is the only one that was cited as having some degree of architectural sophistication for "modern golf", but even that was deemed as too short.

Whitemarsh Valley was lengthy enough, but it didn't seem from early accounts that many found much else in terms of virtue there.

[Peter Pallotta]

Mike
a dumb question, an obvious question, an irrelevant question - I'm not sure which. But it's been swirling around my head for weeks:

What exactly would make a golf course great for the modern game circa 1910, and were most of those making such judgments in print in agreement about it? 

Are the architectural "principles" that I assume underlie that designation for courses built today the same as the ones that said experts knew about and appreciated in 1910 America?

Am I putting the cart before the horse in talking about architectural principles when it comes to golf in 1910?

Thanks
Peter

Actually, Mke - maybe I shouldn't be floating the idea of the fundamental principles of great golf architecture at all, in either context -- then or now. The trouble is, since I got here I've always assumed that these principles exist, out there in the world of ideas, and that past and present they are sometimes stumbled upon and sometimes consciously realized and sometimes even articulated and battled over....but maybe I'm just flat out wrong about all that too.  Maybe the "art" supercedes anything and everything else, a moveable feast of aesthetic understanding and appreciation but coupled with the mundane and prosaic and changing "needs" of the game, e.g. Par 5s that needed to be 400 yards and then 500 yards and then 600 yards...

[Sean_A]

Mike
a dumb question, an obvious question, an irrelevant question - I'm not sure which. But it's been swirling around my head for weeks:

What exactly would make a golf course great for the modern game circa 1910, and were most of those making such judgments in print in agreement about it? 

Are the architectural "principles" that I assume underlie that designation for courses built today the same as the ones that said experts knew about and appreciated in 1910 America?

Am I putting the cart before the horse in talking about architectural principles when it comes to golf in 1910?

Thanks
Peter

Actually, Mke - maybe I shouldn't be floating the idea of the fundamental principles of great golf architecture at all, in either context -- then or now. The trouble is, since I got here I've always assumed that these principles exist, out there in the world of ideas, and that past and present they are sometimes stumbled upon and sometimes consciously realized and sometimes even articulated and battled over....but maybe I'm just flat out wrong about all that too.  Maybe the "art" supercedes anything and everything else, a moveable feast of aesthetic understanding and appreciation but coupled with the mundane and prosaic and changing "needs" of the game, e.g. Par 5s that needed to be 400 yards and then 500 yards and then 600 yards...

If architecture is mainly an artistic venture, and surely this was more so 100 years ago than today, then it seems plausible that decently travelled folks just knew good architecture when they saw it.  In some ways, when the principles of architecture get codified and defined, they e ultimately make courses less appealing so as to fit rigid efinitions.  Is this what happened to blind shots, front to back greens, punchbowl greens, humpty bumpty fairways etc?  They weren't deemed good architecture and so they were avoided.  To this day many features which make golf interesting and fun (tell me again, why do we play the game if not to have fun) are shunned by the masses.  Sure, they pop up here and there, but courses like Lederach and Tobacco Road can never be truly considered great by the masses because they don't neatly fit the definitions of good design.  In truth, most of what is spouted by experts as good design is a load of cobblers.  I wonder what golf would be like if money (in terms of folks making their living off the game) had no bearing on the game. 

Ciao

[Lester George]

Roanoke Country Club, Tillinghast

Lester

[Phil_the_Author]

People always forget that baltusrol had already hosted numerous USGA championships by this time. That they let Tilly replace a course of that stature on the faith that he would create two even better ones beginning in 1918 is an amazing story on its own.

Lester, while it is true that Tilly is responsible for the 27-holes at Roanoke, he hadn't worked on it in 1910 or before. We don't have a confirmed date for when he was there. His first work was at Shawnee which opened in 1911.

[Mike_Cirba]

How about Brookline and other NE courses like Woodlands?

[TEPaul]

How about Shawnee? That was in play before 1910, right?

Peter:

When one considers what "principles" of good architecture were being identified or were beginning to be used by some even back then around the turn of the century, I'd said they were a couple of fundamental ones:

1. The use of ground strategically that was not flat (it's effect on the lie and bounce and run of the ball).
2. The use of angles that were not rectilinear and perpendicular to and dead across the line of play. It has been said that the use of the diagonal angle in various ways is perhaps the most solid fundamental principle in all of golf course architecture.

I think that one of the primary things we all need to keep in mind when we discuss these types of things is that golf course architecture and even very good golf course architecture is not exactly rocket science. The real irony is that in many cases and and in many places and in many ways, Nature herself had already provided it for our benefit and our consideration long before we began to use it and consider it for golf and golf course architecture! 

I suppose the other real irony, and the thing that a man like Behr kept harping on, is that the foregoing with golf course architecture (of the natural variety) just happens to be about the polar opposite from the way man looked at any other ball or stick and ball game he invented and popularized. Behr referred to that basic mentality or construct as "The Game Mind of Man". By that he meant man's inclination to create exact definitional boundaries that were almost always rectilinear.

[Phil_the_Author]

Tom,

Shawnee opened for play on May 1, 1911.

[Peter Pallotta]

Sean, TE - thanks.

This is getting away from Mike's question, but to me there's nothing more interesting than the interplay (and the changing interplay) between principles, art, nature, and shot-testing - and the different ways that architects/critics have tried to codify this interplay over the decades.

Peter

[Ally Mcintosh]

Cornish and Whitten have the landmark courses at the turn of the century as Garden City, Myopia Hunt and Ekwanok... Garden City (Emmet) wasn't considered as such until Travis's original remodelling in 1908 and Travis's course at Ekwanok wasn't really recognised until the 1920's... Their timeline indicates that these three courses were a step ahead of Chicago and Newport for the time and were the link between the Dark Ages and The Golden Age (if you consider the Golden Age starting with NGLA)

All of these have been mentioned of course...

Then there was Oakmont which first appeared in 1904 but probably wasn't recognised as great (just tough) until late on after much of William Fownes tinkering...

That's how I read the era anyway... Others seem to back this up... Whigham's article for one appears to bear this out...

[tlavin]

Hereabouts we had Chicago Golf, Flossmoor and Midlothian among others.  Beverly opened in 1908, but it wasn't really a championship course for a while, although the 1910 Western Open was played there.

[TEPaul]

"Then there was Oakmont which first appeared in 1904 but probably wasn't recognised as great (just tough) until late on after much of William Fownes tinkering...

That's how I read the era anyway... Others seem to back this up... Whigham's article for one appears to bear this out..."


Ally:

There could've been another and very logical reason Oakmont did not appear on the general radar screen earlier than it did and that was for the first few years after its opening it was just not very connected to the USGA. Recognition from the USGA as far as sites to hold championship was very important back then to the recognition some of those earlier courses got.

For instance, Herbert Leeds and Myopia held four US Opens between 1898 and 1908. Leed's essentially refused to hold a US Amateur during that decade because he did not feel the course was completely ready for what he considered at that time to be America's top championship!! (How times have changed, Huh! ).

Fownes, according to Oakmont's history book in the first few years decided to apply for "associate" membership to the USGA because it was cheaper and he frankly wasn't even convinced that joining the USGA was all that necessary in the beginning.

Things like that could very much affect the visibility and recognition of a course back then. The point was it wasn't just about the course and the architecture back then. Just another reason many on here probably don't really see that early age that accurately for what it really was back then.

[Mike_Cirba]

"Then there was Oakmont which first appeared in 1904 but probably wasn't recognised as great (just tough) until late on after much of William Fownes tinkering...

That's how I read the era anyway... Others seem to back this up... Whigham's article for one appears to bear this out..."


Ally:

There could've been another and very logical reason Oakmont did not appear on the general radar screen earlier than it did and that was for the first few years after its opening it was just not very connected to the USGA. Recognition from the USGA as far as sites to hold championship was very important back then to the recognition some of those earlier courses got.

For instance, Herbert Leeds and Myopia held four US Opens between 1898 and 1908. Leed's essentially refused to hold a US Amateur during that decade because he did not feel the course was completely ready for what he considered at that time to be America's top championship!! (How times have changed, Huh! ).

Fownes, according to Oakmont's history book in the first few years decided to apply for "associate" membership to the USGA because it was cheaper and he frankly wasn't even convinced that joining the USGA was all that necessary in the beginning.

Things like that could very much affect the visibility and recognition of a course back then. The point was it wasn't just about the course and the architecture back then. Just another reason many on here probably don't really see that early age that accurately for what it really was back then.

It also doesn't seem that hosting a USGA championship guaranteed a great or very good course necessarily at that time, as mentioned above re: Philly Cricket Club.   While it was certainly an adequate course, by 1910 it wasn't considered of "championship" quality, even locally.

I suspect this was also very true of Chicago GC at that time.

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