What happened in the 1920's to create the boom?

[Patrick_Mucci]

There was a huge explosion of car ownership in the US by 1920 - something like at least 10x the number as in 1910.  There was also a little bit of legislation called the Federal Highway Act (early 20s) which gave cars some decent roads to travel.  Still, car ownership was fairly rare - I think comfortably less than 10% of the population - probably less than 5%.  Still, this would help explain backwoods places having golf courses. 

Could you name five (5) backwoods course locations that weren't serviced by rail, but by car ?


The real explosion in car ownership occurred in the next decade despite the depression and I don't think numbers increased all that much until after WWII.  Even with the full maturity of Baby Boomers (1970ish) I think less than 50% of the population owned cars.  It also wasn't until the Boomers matured that cars really became widely affordable as we think of today. 

We also shouldn't forget that the freeway system started properly in the late 50s - many think at the expense of public transport.

The National Interstate and Defense Highway Act wasn't signed into law until mid 1956.
The first phase, AROW, took years if not decades to implement with the actual completion of many of the designated highways taking more than a few decades.  So, I don't see any substantive connection between the NIDA and the development of golf courses in the 50's or 60's.

The AROW for Public Transportation, centered in the cities and their satellite towns, was incredibly expensive.
The NIDA didn't compromise public transportation.
Like the railroads a century earlier, the Interstate Highways created arteries for commerce and transportation, they opened up America at a regional and national level.

Most golfers weren't taking the Interstates to drive to their local clubs.

[Sven Nilsen]

Pat:

The Hodgman's Automobile Tour of Golf Courses in New England has quite a few golf courses that were not on rail lines:



However, the railroads were still doing a pretty good job around that time of promoting their tours:

[Peter Pallotta]

Sven - I have no proof whatsoever of this, but I have a feeling that the wave of upper class, well educated young men (from schools like Princeton and Harvard, from places like Boston and New York and Chicago) who took up the game as amateurs were a very real factor in the growth of golf in the 1920s. They were/knew the members at the elite clubs; they knew/were the writers and thinkers on and of the game; they travelled - south in the winter, to GB&I in the summer -- and lived the heady carefree lives that Fitzgerald wrote about. And in all this, they served as examples and prods and models (as the wealthy and fashionable often have and still do, and as do the stars of the silver screen) to the middle classes -- setting an ideal that most Americans couldn't match but at least could approach and try to copy, in more modest ways and on more modest golf courses and in more modest towns. The game spoke to the post war prosperity and elegance of the Jazz Age, and age which, I assume, most Americans convinced themselves would go on forever. The Depression and World War II shocked everyone back to 'reality' and the game was never the same again (until very recently). Indeed, I think (in an idea borrowed from Bob Crosby) that much of the post WWII (the so-called Dark Age) style of architecture was a direct if perhaps unconscious reaction to the perceived excess and privilege and dandyism of the young men who'd shaped the Jazz Age. 

Peter

[Sven Nilsen]

Pat:

To get a bit more specific, here are five courses (in New York) that are noted in the 1926 Annual Guide as being accessible by car.  

Skaneateles - Skaneateles Country Club...Eighteen miles from Syracuse, reached by automobile.

Springfield Center - Otsego Golf Club...Ten miles from city, reached by auto.

Stafford - Stafford Country Club...Five miles from city, reached by auto.

Stamford - Stamford Country Club...Two miles from town, reached by auto.

Ticonderoga - Ticonderoga Country Club...Two miles from city, reached by automobile.

To add some clarity, if courses are accessible by train it would be noted in the Guide, like this listing for Shinnecock:

Southampton - Shinnecock Hills Golf Club...Ninety-six miles from New York, reached by L.I.R.R.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Sven,

Almost all of these were accessible by rail.
In fact, the Delaware & Hudson map was a railroad map.
Pat:

The Hodgman's Automobile Tour of Golf Courses in New England has quite a few golf courses that were not on rail lines:



However, the railroads were still doing a pretty good job around that time of promoting their tours:

[Patrick_Mucci]

Pat:

To get a bit more specific, here are five courses (in New York) that are noted in the 1926 Annual Guide as being accessible by car.

They're accessible by car because they're in local towns, not removed from them. 

Skaneateles - Skaneateles Country Club...Eighteen miles from Syracuse, reached by automobile.

Skaneateles is a town dating back before 1796 or 130 years before the golf course was cited.
Friends of mine had a pencil factory in Skaneateles in the 50's.

Springfield Center - Otsego Golf Club...Ten miles from city, reached by auto.

Stafford - Stafford Country Club...Five miles from city, reached by auto.

Stamford - Stamford Country Club...Two miles from town, reached by auto.

Ticonderoga - Ticonderoga Country Club...Two miles from city, reached by automobile.

And you think that two (2), five (5) and ten (10) miles from these towns are "backwoods places" as Sean described?

You need to read more carefully and with a heightened degree of comprehension 

To add some clarity, if courses are accessible by train it would be noted in the Guide, like this listing for Shinnecock:

Southampton - Shinnecock Hills Golf Club...Ninety-six miles from New York, reached by L.I.R.R.

Beverly Hills, CA is about 2,800 miles from New York City, but that doesn't make it a "backwoods place"

[David Harshbarger]

Sven, when is that American Annual Golf Guide from?  The D&H railroad is here where I live, and some of those * are intriguing.  Tue map doesn't appear to be quite right: Ballston Spamis well west of Saratoga Lake.  But, there's no course at Round Lake that I know of.

Thanks, Dave

[Garland Bayley]

No one had invented jogging and golf carts yet.

[Tiger_Bernhardt]

Could the rapid economic expansion have something to do with it?

[Sven Nilsen]

Pat:

Here's the line of conversation which you seem to have lost track of:

First came the trains, so they built golf courses close to the train lines.

Then came the cars, so they were able to build golf courses in spots that previously would have been very difficult to get to (this is what Sean meant by "backwoods," and its not my fault you didn't comprehend that).  

Five miles out of town in the 20's was very much the boonies.  This was pre-suburban sprawl, and at a time when a 5 Mile car ride might take you as long as a 20 or 30 mile drive today.

Your Beverly Hills analogy is idiotic and has nothing to do with the point I was making, which was simply that if a course was accessible by rail the 1926 guide notes that fact (by accessible I mean you could take the train and walk to the course from the depot).  Thus, if the only method of access noted was by automobile, the course was nowhere near a rail line.

Also, I am fully aware that the Delaware & Hudson Map was a train map, and said so in my post.  Please work on your own reading comprehension.

David:

I believe the Map is from the 1916 Guide, I'll double check some time soon.  As for Round Lake, there was a nine hole course established around the turn of the century called Round Lake GC.

All the best,

Sven

[Sven Nilsen]

I stumbled across a couple of advertisements for European railroad golf tours.  As America moved to the automobile as the preferred method of travel, Europe was very much still reliant on the train, even for leisure travel.

The first is for a tour of Switzerland:



The second ad is for a German railroad golf tour.  There were two things that struck me about this ad on first viewing, that it is in English and that it has a date of 1939:

[Andrew Lewis]

The British Railway posters from that time period tie together several topics introduced here, but especially the notion of upward mobility leading to destination golf travel.

A short yet informative piece on this can be found at http://www.shivas.org/TheJournal/JournalIssue3/GolfandRailwayAdvertisinginBritain.aspx.

[David Harshbarger]

Sven, plenty of Americans doing business with Germany in '39 

[Jim_Kennedy]

Something to remember in all this, the boom was mainly an 'upper-crust' phenomenon. Some 600 courses per year were built between '23 and '30, 80% of which were private clubs.

Also, it was around 1920 when the USGA allowed architects (and those in other related fields, think Ouimet) to keep their amateur status while receiving payment for the work they did.

 

[Sven Nilsen]

Jim:

The amateur status decision likely had an impact, but I'm not sure how great it was on the whole.

I'm not so convinced that the fact that 80% of the courses were private clubs necessarily means this was an "upper crust" phenomenon.  For every Raynor or Tillinghast being built on the east coast or in California, there were probably five courses that to this day remain as unknowns that were being built in small farm or crossroads towns throughout rural America.  The moniker Golf Club takes on a slightly different meaning when you're talking about Dillon, Mississippi, Noonan, North Dakota or Sapulpa, Oklahoma.

The dispersion of courses built during the decade suggests to me that this may have been more of a "middle class" phenomenon. 

Sven

[Mike_Trenham]

I think it had as much to do with the transition of America from an agriculture employment economy to a manufacturing employment economy.  This resulted in all sorts of time saving advances around the home, like packaged foods, appliances, telephones, furnaces which saved homeowners money as they could run the house with less staff and more free time.  Plus there was no television to entertain us.  Golf takes a lot of time to play and a lot of attempts to play decent.

The great depression came when there were not enough agriculture jobs and the farm workers lacked the skills or ability to relocate near the factories plus the factories were becoming more and more efficient.  The current economic woes are much the same as we move from manufacturing to service or highly automated manufacturing and distribution economy.  For skilled workers our economy is okay for low skilled workers this is another great depression however growth won't make any good paying jobs for unskilled folks unlike the past.