A quick article on the course via google....
The meat of the article is about 1/2 way down.
What golf was like 100 years ago
at my boyhood course.
By ROBERT SULLIVAN
I remember it like it was 45 years ago. Which it was.
My brother Kevin and I were in the first proper tee-box of our then-young lives. We had played some pitch-and-putt with Mom and Dad earlier, and had been to the driving range in Nashua more than once. But this was different. That first hole at Vesper Country Club in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, a verdant fairway winding to the horizon before us, was a grown-up-sized par-4. Kevin and I peered through the early-morning gloaming of a humid summer’s day and were thrilled, nervous, and way too small. Even though Vesper’s venerable club pro, Dave Hackney, had given us a quick lesson after selling Mom two sets of cut-down irons, two cut-down putters, and two white-canvas Sunday bags (probably $25 for the whole), there was little hope that these sticks and Mr. Hackney’s tips would propel either of us to the green in single figures. Kevin went adventuring down the left side of the fairway, while I trundled up the right, balfing and scalfing my way towards yonder pin, then five- or-six-putting to complete the hole. Vesper is known throughout the Greater Lowell golfing community for its large, undulating, firm greens—but I’m not making excuses here. I was altogether amazed that the putting stroke that worked so very well for me in mini-golf was so ineffective in this, the “big show.”
And so Kevin and I moved off to hole No. 2, a monster par-4 that devoured us; hole No. 3, with that ball-sucking willow tree on the right; hole No. 4, the par-3 across a sliver of the Merrimack (Vesper is half on an island in mid-river and half on “the mainland”); hole No. 5, the huge uphill par-5; hole No. 6.…
Well, I think we quit after five. Or during.
What prompted this reminiscence? It was news that came to me earlier this year that the centennial Massachusetts Amateur was staged at Vesper, precisely a hundred years after the tournament debuted on those same hallowed holes as the Massachusetts Open Championship in 1905. The information, conveyed to me in New York by folks “back home,” spurred a wave of nostalgia. My first golf course… family-doubles tennis… swim team… Mike, Jimmy, and the guys… the Scannell sisters, the Donahue girls.…
Still, I wanted to look back at Vesper and contemplate the club.
What was golf like, back when? What was it like in 1905 at Tyngs Island, when the best golfers in the land drove across the rattling wood bridge and arrived at Vesper’s stolid clubhouse, ready to launch a new tournament?
While the various Yonkerses and Oakhursts and Brooklines and Newports and Montreals of golf were part of the late 19th-century invasion on the North American shores, Vesper was not quite part of that first bloom of fairways—not as a golf club, at least. Even as hackers were hacking out the first nines and 18s on those other sites, Vesper was getting itself organized as a boat club. It was formed on April 9, 1875, by a group of enthusiasts whose first edict was to buy a four-oared boat. By decade’s end these gents were ensconced in their clubhouse, holding annual regattas in sculls and canoes, throwing dinner-dances, bowling, and playing competitive billiards in the basement.
Even before the boat club was formed, Tyngs Island was a popular stopping place for outings and picnics; Henry David Thoreau lunched there himself with his brother and described it in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The short of it is, the Vesper boatmen set their sites on the attractive parcel, and eventually bought it. In 1894 they laid out a splendid bicycling oval on land that is now part of the third fairway—they became state champs in cycling—and built baseball diamonds, too.
According to One Hundred Years at Vesper (Brendan D. Leahey), in 1895, members received a memo that Mr. Lloyd of the Essex, Massachusetts, golf course would be on the island to discuss the burgeoning new sport. Persuaded by Lloyd, “the Executive Committee decided to lay out a course of six ‘links.’ These links were improved during the year and were in constant use almost immediately; and on holidays there has barely been room for members who wanted to play, and it would be advisable to add three more links and thus make a regulation number and by so doing, do away with the interference.” A pine grove on the island was targeted, and Vesper quickly had its nine.
The committee further noted that “Golf has come to stay and last year (1896) it was the principal attraction on the island. In fact, at present it is the only game which Vesper Country Club has brought into prominence.” This was a nod to rare slumps by the club’s bowlers and bikers as well as the continued futility by its ballplayers, coupled with wins in golf over teams from nearby Concord, Lexington, and Salem.
“An attempt at sheep grazing on the Vesper course apparently aroused no enthusiasm,” Dr. Leahey writes. “In the 1897 records we read, ‘The sheep at Vesper will be ready for market by November 1, and any member wishing to purchase some Vesper mutton may do so.’ ”
Other things, too, were tried and then decided against. But Vesper’s golfers behaved in properly New England, puritanical fashion, and golf flourished on Tyngs Island, where the great Briton Harry Vardon visited in 1900 for an exhibition. In 1903, the Massachusetts Golf Association was founded, and Vesper became a charter member. In 1904, golf was status quo at the club, while automobiling was added as an official Vesper recreation.
And then, in 1905, the inaugural Golf Championship came to Vesper. It was won by none other than Donald Ross, the émigré Scot who remains today the most famous course designer. Ross, who was then based in Massachusetts—the move to Pinehurst would come later—played Vesper several times, as did many a Bay State native of skill (Francis Ouimet comes to mind). In fact, Ross would return to Tyngsboro in 1917 to design Vesper’s second nine holes, reshape the originals, and create the course that Kevin and I sampled 45 years ago—and that still entertains today. But it is a footnote from 1905 that I’ve found that speaks to the times—and that shows Vesper had the egalitarian spirit, and helped the game grow to the mammoth and popular enterprise it is today. This, from the Annual Meeting report:
“Resolved: that the members of the Vesper Country Club view with apprehension the tendency to increase the price of golf balls, as being calculated to hamper the enjoyment of the game by persons classified as players and to discourage accession to them in numbers. The golf committee is requested to consider the expediency of handicapping by not less than 1/2 a stroke per hole any ball retailing at more than 50 cents each and is authorized to take such action as may be deemed necessary to give effect to such action.”
Nike’s worst nightmare: paying the penalty for making golfers pay extra. Those were the days!