From an earlier thread:
Country Club of Buffalo, Williamsville, N.Y.
By Ron Whitten
One of the many interesting aspects of Donald Ross is that the man designed so many golf courses in so many different locations over such a long period of time, a career in excess of 45 years, that we rarely need to speculate what Ross might have done on the kind of sites we see courses built upon today. If we look hard enough, we can usually find a course where Ross dealt with a similar terrain.
So if you wonder how Donald Ross might have handled a design in an abandoned quarry, wonder no longer. He did such a course, the Country Club of Buffalo, back in the mid-1920s.
The main feature of Country Club of Buffalo is the old Young Quarry, from which limestone was excavated in the 19th Century and used on the exteriors of many of Buffalo's most prominent early buildings. Shaped like the letter C, it wasn't an enormously large quarry, and the layout Ross prepared has it intersecting just half a dozen holes. But it is a typical masterful Ross routing, changing direction on nearly every hole, bringing the quarry into play on both nines, at many different angles.
The course begins casually on the relatively flat property, with three well-bunkered but not overly difficult par 4s followed by the 501-yard par 5 fourth that, in this age, isn't much more than a par 4 for good players. The quarry lurks along the right edge of the 306-yard fifth, but is really only a hazard at that point for those who might shank an approach shot.
Standing on the tee of the 173-yard sixth, the main section of the quarry unfolds in dramatic fashion. From the series of tees positioned along the south rim, the sixth plays into the bowl-shaped pit to what arguably could be termed an island green, a green perched well above the quarry floor and totally surrounded by steep grass slopes imbedded with a couple of bunkers. The sixth green was presumably built on an ancient rock outcropping that even miners could not chip away. The huge green, almost at the same elevation as the tee, is wide and deep, positioned at a diagonal, with separate levels.
The sixth at the Country Club of Buffalo must be seen to be believed. It could well be the most outrageous par 3 that Donald Ross ever conceived. Many call it "the volcano hole," but it reminds me more of what the deck of the Titanic must surely have looked like minutes after its fatal brush with an iceberg. The green is listing badly to the southeast. It's canted, slanted and slippery. It's also big, much bigger than shown on Ross's original plan, obviously adjusted in the field during construction, probably to fit the outcropping, but by whom? Ross himself, or maybe an enterprising associate? We’ll never know for sure. Regardless of whose idea it was, the sixth is an amazing, unforgettable hole.
It must be noted that this "island green" is not surrounded by a barren rock floor. Even in Ross's day (as evidenced by early photographs), the floor of the quarry was covered with grass. (Did Ross have topsoil hauled in for this purpose? Again, we'll likely never know.) The only exposed rocks, then and now, are the vertical quarry walls.
The par-4 seventh plays up out of the quarry and past another pit on the right, and the front nine concludes not at the clubhouse but close enough. (Youngs Road bisects the property, with only the first and 18th on the clubhouse side of the street. Everything else is east of what is now a very busy road.)
Another vein of the quarry is crossed on the 417-yard 11th, where the plateau fairway stops abruptly at the edge of the quarry (effectively throttling back big hitters), then begins down below, edging 75 yards of curving rock wall on the right before rising out again, to the green back above. Then comes the 187-yard 12th, from high back tees on the rim, over a narrow neck of old quarry containing a pit lake, to a green on the far rim, its front flank a steep grassy decline back into the pit, its sides sloping into deep bunkers. This, to me, is the "volcano hole."
The 545-yard 13th, the longest hole on the course, is a boomerang down through the bowels of the bowl to a shallow green perched above the fairway atop a high wall. If the final four holes don't involve such dramatic elevation changes, they are still sternly bunkered and quite good, particularly the dogleg-right 425-yard 18th, uphill all the way to a green on a deliberate shelf, the right side dropping abruptly off, the left side nestled at the base of an escarpment-turned-rock garden, with a beautiful brick-and-stone clubhouse (yes, limestone) atop the escarpment, positioned off to the side instead of directly behind the green.
The Country Club of Buffalo is another of those marvelous Ross layouts that's only recently been rediscovered, thanks in part to sympathetic bunker restoration some years back by architect Craig Schreiner. Robert Trent Jones, who grew up in nearby Rochester, once called it one of the best courses he’d ever played. In the 1960s, Golf Digest listed it among America's 200 Toughest. But at just 6,620 yards, par 70, it's never been considered true championship stuff, mainly, I suspect, because of its limited-season location. The course hosted the 1931 Women’s Amateur and the 1950 Curtis Cup, but that's it nationally, and with such a busy street running through the course, it’s hard to imagine any sort of major spectator event being conducted there anymore.
Contrary to John Steinbreder's book, Golf Courses of the U.S. Open, the Ross course did not host a U.S. Open. The club did host the 1912 Open, but that was at its former location closer to town, at a course now known as Grover Cleveland Municipal. Back then, the U.S. Open was conducted in August, so there was plenty of time to establish good turf following a typical harsh Buffalo winter.
When it comes to early-American "quarry courses," I like it better than the far more famous Merion East. It may lack Merion's tournament history, but Buffalo's quarry holes are more intriguing, and it has four times as many of them.