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Who designed Sanford's golf course? City attorneys won't like the answer
The city's historical museum may have the answer.
By Rene Stutzman, Orlando Sentinel
October 1, 2011
SANFORD — Who designed the golf course at Sanford's 90-year-old Mayfair Country Club?
That is the issue at the heart of a lawsuit filed last month by Maece Taylor Inc., the company with a $1 million, 20-year city contract to operate the course.
The answer appears to be tucked inside a file at the Sanford Museum, a city-owned facility that's chock full of artifacts from the city's past.
And the news is not good for city and its lawyers.
The city's official position — and it's echoed by a plaque on Mayfair's first tee — is that the designer was Donald Ross, a prolific and revered golf course architect in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. His courses are still among the most highly rated in the nation.
But in a museum file marked "Golf Course," newspaper clippings from the 1920s and letters from the estate of a local citrus baron indicate the first nine holes were designed by Cameron Trent, a relative nobody in golf-course design.
S.O. "Syd" Chase, a citrus grower, land owner and member of the family that founded Sunniland Corp., wrote a letter to Tom Bendelow, a golf course designer in Chicago, on March 22, 1922. Bendelow had supervised Trent on another golf course project and Chase wanted to know if Trent could be trusted to design one for Sanford.
The file does not include Bendelow's response, but a Sanford Herald clipping from April 20, 1922, reports that a 50-man crew was at work building the course, that it was "laid out by Mr. Trent" and that he was supervising the work.
Another Herald story two years later — Sept. 27, 1924 — reports that the city had hired W.D. Clark to supervise the laying out of the back nine and to rework the front nine, which he complained to the newspaper "were practically obliterated" by golfers failing to put back divots.
That led city historian Alicia Clarke to conclude in a 2008 Sanford Historical Society newsletter item that Trent and Clark were the designers.
How did the information about Ross get on that plaque?
That was the work of a different group, the Seminole County Historical Commission, in the late 1990s. Chairman Cecil Tucker said late last month that the three members who did the research are now dead, and he's not sure what their sources were. His group will now do more work, he said.
Confused enough? There's more. One of the most respected golf course critics in the country co-authored a book 20 years ago called "The Architects of Golf" that identified the course as the work of Cuthbert Butchart. He was a native of Scotland and noted golf instructor, club maker and course designer from the same era.
Ron Whitten, a writer at Golf Digest, said he and co-author Geoffrey Cornish, based their conclusion on stories published by golf magazines in the 1920s.
Whoever designed Mayfair, he said, it wasn't Ross.
Whitten toured the course a few years back, he said, and "It looked nothing like any Donald Ross course I had anything to do with."
The mix-up about Ross probably happened, he said, because for a time Mayfair was called the Seminole Country Club, and Ross had designed a course with a similar name — Seminole Golf Club — in Palm Beach in 1929.
According to Maece Taylor, it would never have paid $1 million for its lease had it known that Ross wasn't the designer.
City officials said it doesn't matter who designed the course. If it was someone other than Ross, that's still not a breach of contract.
The real story, they say, is that Maece Taylor has been behind on its lease and utility payments three out of the four years it has leased the place, and the city has consistently tried to work with it to make the deal work.
rstutzman@tribune.com or 407-650-6394.
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