Saltville GC, Virginia - Who did it?

[A.G._Crockett]

AG -

Mathieson Alkali Works had the money and it was that entity that had the course built.  The company had links to the Northeast (their main offices were in NYC), and certainly had the connections to get in touch with a name designer.  I don't think its fair to rule out the possibility at this point for the reasons you've stated.

From the Harvard Business School write-up on the company:

"Mathieson Alkali Works was founded to take advantage of natural salt deposits in Saltville, Virginia. Neil Mathieson, a British soda ash and bleaching powder merchant, obtained a charter in Virginia to open an alkali plant in 1892. Mathieson bought out the Holston Salt and Plaster Company and sent his son Thomas and fifty workers to establish the new company. Bleaching powder was the main product. It was manufactured using electrolytic cells that forced chlorine to be absorbed in lime. The company also ran a factory near Niagara Falls, with its abundant electric power supply and nearby salt mines. The company pioneered commercial production of liquid chlorine in 1909. The liquefied chlorine was immediately in demand as a bleaching agent and for industrial use. In 1919 Mathieson began producing ammonia, a byproduct of electrolytic alkali processes, for sale. A form of soluble, dry, stable chlorine known as calcium hypochlorite went on the market in 1928 under the name HTH. In the 1930s Mathieson began shipping caustics for use in rayon manufacture. The company also sold sodium bicarbonate for cooking and industry, alkali for pH control, and dry ice and carbonic gas. In 1934 the company built an ammonium-soda plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  Chlorine was in high demand during the Second World War. Mathieson chlorine was used in high-octane jet and tank fuel, in cooling fluids for engines, in plastics and insulation, in explosives and fire extinguishers, in fabrics, and in water-treatment facilities. In 1949 Mathieson expanded to manufacture fertilizers, pesticides, and sulfuric acid for agriculture and industry. It grew in the early 1950s, acquiring the E.R. Squibb & Sons pharmaceutical company in 1952. Squibb was spun off in 1968.

Olin and Mathieson each had sales of $250 million in 1954, the year they merged into the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation."

Sven

Sven,
I actually know all of this already.  My mother worked in Saltville in the 1960's, commuting several times a week from Wytheville to work at the Saltville Daily Progress.  For that work, she was paid $10 per day, which even then was nothing.  That she would drive 45 miles to work for $10 per day says volumes about Appalachia.  And the '20's were even worse, by most accounts.

I don't doubt that the company had money.  But I believe that the money flowed out of the area almost entirely, and I don't think you would find many people in Saltville with fond memories of the good old days of the Olin Mathieson Company.  The idea that the company would have spent money to bring in a GCA to build a golf course is just impossible for me to believe, and it didn't happen anywhere else in that part of the state in those days.  Saltville wasn't different or richer or more enlightened than anywhere else in that part of Virginia in the '20's.

[Sven Nilsen]

We can agree to disagree.  

It doesn't strike me as unreasonable that MAW would have hired someone to build a golf course, whether it was meant for the enjoyment of their executives or the town as a whole.  That happened elsewhere, maybe not in that corner of Virginia, but it did happen.  What other towns in the area were moving $18 mil. of product on an annual basis?

Truth is, we'll probably never know.  So we'll both have the benefit of never being proved wrong.

But I would like to see some photos of the other holes as they looked back then.