What golf club has held its history including its architectural history.....

[TEPaul]

...... and architectural evolution in the highest regard and preserved it, recorded it, and explained it the best throughout its existence?

I suppose I am looking for some of the older clubs throughout the world with the most significant and respected architecture but frankly at this point, any will do. I'm not talking about preserving its course or architecture just the history and evolution of its architecture!

[Bill_McBride]

Oakmont?

[Bradley Anderson]

1. Old Elm

2. Oakmont

3. Shoreacres

[Tom_Doak]

As you would expect from the club that set down the rules, The Honourable Company (Muirfield) has done a pretty good job of keeping records ... they have maps in the locker room of different iterations of the routing between 1891 and 1926, plus Simpson's letters to the club, etc.

Garden City has done a good job, but not outstanding -- there are records of Travis' suggestions but it is hard to follow exactly what of them were implemented.  Merion of course has great documentation going "almost" back to the beginning.    Pine Valley has been pretty thorough, too.

[Bill_McBride]

No matter what the club is, it's great to see them maintaining records and hanging lots of old photos of the evolution of the course.

Two good examples are Eugene Country Club and Columbia-Edgewater (Portland), both in Oregon.

CECC has a ton of framed photos of the early A. V. Macan course (no trees!) and you can see the forestation over the years.  The routing is essentially the same as 1925, although the first hole became a par 4 when the old clubhouse burned across the main road and was relocated to an area that included the old first tee (now #10).

Eugene has two really good routing maps, same size and scale, hung side by side in the clubhouse.  On the left is the original Chandler Egan routing.  On the right is the RTJ remodel that pretty much reversed the routing within the existing corridors.  Very cool to trace the old course.

[Doug Wright]

TE,

Our hardcover book celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the Denver Country Club has a comprehensive history of the architecture of the golf course, which is quite interesting because of the sheer number of people who were involved to some extent (Foulis, Ross, Flynn. even Tilly and much more recently Bill Coore). I've found that not all of the history in the book is spot on accurate, but it's close enough. The course also went through several re-routings typical of a course in a changing urban setting during the first 60 years or so. There are renderings of the different routings in the locker room.

[Anthony Gray]

  Tom,


 If better records were kept this site would have less arguments. I think the problem may lie in that the older courses did not understand that their designs were making history. Ergo the history of construction and changes were not kept.

 Anthony

[Bill Brightly]

Tom,

I've written about this before, but I worked closely with the last 3 Hackensack club presidents to locate, display and explain our architectural history. This includes "good, the bad and the ugly" changes that were made, all as part of a steady restoration process.

It became a bit of an obsession for me and the last president...but we now have all the old plans displayed throughout the clubhouse, including an old sprinkler plan (in reverse) that was used by William Gordon to make changes in 1960. Prior to this, we had no proof of what Gordon did, but once we solved the mystery, we had our full architectural history.

We also made some cool discoveries. For example, many people attributed Hackensack to Raynor, or at least the routing. (George Bahto's book lists it for Raynor, and a famous NJ sports writer, Red Smith wrote the same thing in the 1960's) But by pouring through old newspapers and club minutes, we proved that we did not acquire the land in Oradell to build our new course until July of 1926. After a tax dispute with the City of Hackensack,  we made a pretty quick merger with the very small Kinderkamack Club, and Raynor had already died in January of 1926. So this was clearly Banks first solo design!

Another cool thing: from the time I was a kid our logo was a white unicorn. Well, we found a letter written in the 1899 on a piece of old stationary and the logo was a blue golf flag with HGC in gold. Very classic look, so we created a "member's only" logo collection of merchandise in the pro shop and the members loved it.  By speaking with some very old members, we learned that a powerful president in the 50's had an artistic daughter and she created the unicorn logo so he implemented it at our club!!! (Turns out this guy carried the club by paying members's dues during previous tough times.

So now the old blue and gold flag has returned and we are fazing out the unicorn.

[Patrick_Mucci]

TEPaul,

Some clubs, which chose to produce a club history seem to have done a decent job, although, some of those histories aren't architecturally oriented, and even when they are, they're not always accurate.

Better yet are the golf clubs that have mostly preserved their architecture with few amendments, other than lengthening.

Mt Ridge is one of those clubs.
A 1929 Donald Ross that's mostly intact.
Fortunately, the club has the 1929 drawing/plan prominently displayed, and very little has changed over the intervening 80 years.

[Philip Gawith]

TE Paul - judging by a meeting with secretary a few years ago, Kennemer in Holland (Colt) have a good record of the club's history and continue to  give it priority, hence the post of club historian.

[Tom MacWood]

1. Old Elm

2. Oakmont

3. Shoreacres

Bradley
Could you elaborate on how these clubs have preserved, recorded and explained their architectural history?

[Andrew Mitchell]

Alwoodley apparently have detailed records, including MacKenzie's original plan for the course.

Nick Leefe (Club historian) or Mark Rawlinson (author of Alwoodley's Centenary book) would be able to tell us more.

[Bill_McBride]

Alwoodley apparently have detailed records, including MacKenzie's original plan for the course.

Nick Leefe (Club historian) or Mark Rawlinson (author of Alwoodley's Centenary book) would be able to tell us more.

Nick was actually carrying the original, hand drawn map of Alwoodley around in the boot (trunk) of his car when I saw it in 2005!

[Mark Bourgeois]

Ganton and Rye might be two good candidates for England.  Both histories include details of who did what and when.  Additionally, Ganton's contains a c. 1908 photocopy of meeting minutes addressing architectural issues.

[Mark Pearce]

I think both Alwoodley and HCEG are excellent suggestions.

[Rich Goodale]

Tom

This is a very good question in one regard (i.e. trying to see which clubs have been the best in recording and tracking down facts regarding GCA), but a less satisfying one if one is trying to find some sort of meaning from the these facts.

Virtually all of my "knowledge" in these areas relates to mostly "great" courses in Great Britain and Ireland, and the more I look and learn at these courses, the more I believe that any "attribution" as to what they look like and play like today is far more due to the activities of and visions of golf club committees (collectively, over time) than any individual architect (or even architects).

To know how and when and by whom and why any individual changes were made on course X or course Y is mostly a trivial pursuit.  In VERY rare occasions, Club X or club Y might use such trivia to make a point as to how their course might be improved today, by going back into the future, as it were.  Maybe the ~ 2000 Merion 1930 retro look project is a good example of this, or the fairly recent remodelling of Lahinch as Mackenzie would have wished it, or Tom Doak's work at Pasatiempo and SFGC.  However, even though this is probably a good use (if properly designed and skillfully executed) , it is also an idiosyncratic one, based on the visions of the committees of those clubs, as they were constituted at that time they made the decision for retro-change.

I find all the old facts which are uncovered on this site, by people like Melvyn Morrow, Niall Carlton, Sean Tully, The Mackenzie Project, Tom MacWood, etc. to be fascinating, but I am a trivia junkie.  Only a small percentage of them actually has any influence on the enjoyment of the golf courses which I play.  For example, to know that such a hole as "Sandy Parlour" at Deal once existed, and to be able to locate it even today, is a cool fact, like seeing a plaque in London saying that "This was the spot of Sid Vicious' first public puke."  But, I've been by Sandy Parlour 5-10 times (mostly recently) and nobody I have played with there has ever tried to convince me why that lost hole deserved anything more than a tip of the hat in passing.

Or to put it more bluntly, Tom:

Who cares who designed Merion or Myopia or Cruden Bay and if so, why?

Ricardo

[Scott Warren]

Who cares who designed ... Myopia

I agree, Rich. Pretty shortsighted if you ask me...

[Rich Goodale]

True, Scott, but as both of my parents (and even me!) were born and grew up within a mile of the place where the Myopia Club was established and first situated (hint, it is 30 miles or so from the current location in Hamilton), I get a free pass on that one!

Hope all is well

Rich

[ChipOat]

Merion doesn't get a vote?

Yes, yes, yes, I know - the whole MacDonald/Whigham/Barker/Wilson thing.

Other than that possible ambiguity, the whole archives project at MGC in the last eight years has spawned much detailed research into the evolution of the East Course since 1912.

Is this thread about to get hijacked?

[PCCraig]

1. Old Elm

2. Oakmont

3. Shoreacres

Bradley-

We've agreed on this in that past, but I'll go ahead and agree again on Old Elm. The course literally hasn't changed at all in it's history, and I would assume that is directly related to the membership likeing it exactly as is and knowing enough to not screw around with it. Through the years they haven't even changed the par on the course...so it's a par-73 on the card, when really it could easily be played as a par-69 course for a zero handicap. Just a great place.



I would also add TCC-Brookline to the discussion. The membership takes extreme pride in their history including their golf course(s) and can tell you all about the evolution of the course.

[michael damico]

this is kind of off topic, but as an architect, how difficult is it to obtain these documents? Say a club asked you to renovate/restore/redesign a course, would they provide all pertinent materials? or does it fall on the firm to gather such materials?

[BCrosby]

Rich -

I agree with you to a point. Attributions are often unclear. Sometimes inherently so. For the reasons you give. As Tom D. has mentioned several times, there are lots of courses about which we will never have definitive evolution histories. That is true not just of minor courses, but also any number of important courses. Like you, I think those debates aren't very interesting.

But problems with nailing attributions for certain courses does not mean that attributions never matter. I think they do matter when two things are true: (a) the attributions are reliable, and (b) the designs on the ground are intended to put into practice articulated design ideas.

Let me flesh that out a little. We know what various architects said about their design objectives. Attributions (when reliable) have real value when we can look and see how architects implemented their stated objectives. Attributions matter when they help explicate the linkage between design ideas and actual built features (whether or not they still exist).

Architectural theories and how they were implemented have both changed over time. They both evolved and there are a number of historical threads. Understanding those threads is what it means to understand the history of golf architecture. (You do think gca has a history, I assume; that it was more than just a series of chance occurrences.)

But all of that is important for another reason. That historical data is (or ought to be) an incredibly useful resource for current architects.

Agreed that some courses design attributions are a big, sloppy mash-up. But on some courses that is not the case. When you can link what a designer tells us about his design ideas and with what he actually did, you have mined historical gold. Again, it is gold not just in some abstract historical sense (though I think that is very important). It is also an important (and free ) tool to be used by modern, practicing architects. Sadly, I think that tool often goes unused these day.

Bob

P.S. I wonder if some of this isn't the very different ways that British and American clubs view their golf courses. I'd guess that British clubs tend to take a much more ad hoc approach to design changes. Which create bigger attribution headaches than you get on American courses. But I don't know.

[Brad Tufts]

True, Scott, but as both of my parents (and even me!) were born and grew up within a mile of the place where the Myopia Club was established and first situated (hint, it is 30 miles or so from the current location in Hamilton), I get a free pass on that one!

Rich

Yup, it was actually established as a baseball club of all things by the four glasses-wearing sons of Mayor Prince of Boston.  If you get stuck in the mud while on the way to the former site, you might need a Winch to pull yourself out... 

[Jim_Kennedy]

Rich,

The people who care are the ones who write their club histories, are interested in restoring their course, finding more about their family history, recovering lost golf courses and getting funding to do so, and others.

[Mark Bourgeois]

ForkaB

That is a masterful effort, far more impressive than the ham-handed albeit sinfully delightful approaches of the departed JakaB.  Sadly and indicative of the new GCA.com, I suspect it will range far beyond many newbies' faculties to comprehend, or the interests to comment.

Fortunately there's still Bob and I to rise to the bait.  And so in response I ask two questions of you: how can we know intent without first documenting action?  And absent this documentation, why do green committees and Pooh Bahs feel the need to create historical intent?

Dead Harry is doing a bang-up job designing the new holes at Wentworth.