Joe Bissen is a Caledonia, Minnesota, native and former golf letter-winner at Winona State University. He is a retired sports copy editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press and former sports editor of the Duluth News-Tribune. His writing has appeared in Minnesota Golfer and Mpls.St.Paul magazines. He lives in South St. Paul, MN. Joe's award-winning first book, "Fore! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses 1897-1999," was released in December 2013, and a follow-up, "More! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses, Part II" was released in July 2020. The books are most readily available online at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble (bn.com). He continues to write about lost courses on this website and has uncovered more than 245 of them.
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There is one curious sidebar to the early history of Lakeview-then-Hillcrest Golf Club. It concerns the notion that half of an entire neighborhood of St. Paul could have become golf course grounds.
Preposterous, right?
In the end, probably yes. But maybe, just maybe, not if Charles Gordon had had his way.
The year was 1921, the month December. It was shortly after — barring some all-time Month No. 12 heat wave that I don’t know about — Lakeview Golf & Country Club had concluded its first season of play on a thin, rectangular plot at the northeastern corner of St. Paul, in what is now known as the Hayden Heights neighborhood. (Lakeview would become known as Hillcrest in 1923. Photo at the top of this post shows Hillcrest, now a Minnesota lost golf course, at Larpenteur Avenue in April 2019.)
If a two-paragraph entry in the Dec. 30 Minneapolis Star is to be believed, someone had bigger plans for the neighborhood than a mere 18-holer.
“New Club for St. Paul,” read a sub-headline on a longer story.
“A new golf club is planned for St. Paul which probably will be one of the largest in the northwest,” the entry began. “The club will have over 2,000 members and will be a 36-hole course.
“C.W. Gordon of the Somerset club is one of the principal backers. The club will be for the salaried men and the annual dues will be $25. C. Raynor will be employed as architect. The course will be built on the tracts of land near the Lakeview Club.”
Well, knock me over with a featherie.
Where do I start?
A) I never heard of such a thing.
B) Two thousand members? (Yes, the story read 2,000, not some other number.) That is preposterous on its face, even knowing that in 1921 golf in Minnesota and the Twin Cities was entering a decade of tremendous growth.
C) Thirty-six holes, with 18 in the neighborhood having been dedicated just months before? Seems unlikely, and I’ll get to more of that.
D) Did someone say Raynor?
There is this, in defense of the Star story: C.W. Gordon was a man of considerable means, so the idea that he had grand plans should come as no surprise.
Charles William Gordon was president of Gordon & Ferguson, a St. Paul clothing manufacturer and wholesaler. His family lived at 378 Summit Avenue and was well connected in business and sporting circles, tied to The Minikahda Club, Town & Country Club and then the patrician Somerset Country Club in Mendota Heights, of which Gordon was a principal founder in 1919. Gordon was so well connected, in fact, that he served as a pallbearer at the 1916 funeral of St. Paul railroad and banking magnate James J. Hill.
Gordon helped establish Somerset in part because he believed Town & Country Club had become overly congested, Rick Shefchik wrote in his classic Minnesota golf book “From Fields to Fairways.” Perhaps that same notion led Gordon to believe there was a similar opportunity in St. Paul’s northeast, where Lakeview/Hillcrest was founded in part as a response to perceived overcrowding at nearby Phalen Park Golf Course, established in 1917.
Still, it’s a stretch to think that area could have reasonably accommodated 36 more holes of golf. After all, even as early as 1921, three other clubs — Phalen, Lakeview and Northwood Country Club in North St. Paul — were already operating within five miles of the 36-hole site proposed by Gordon.
If you ask me, and I know you didn’t but I’m going to tell you anyway, I don’t see how 36 more holes would have fit into this area. (I’m operating under the assumption that the Star story referred to property only in St. Paul and not adjacent Oakdale or then-New Canada townships.) Here’s a 1916 plat map, closest to 1921 I could find:
Hayden Heights area of St. Paul, 1916 plat map. Much of the area was referred to as Furness’ Garden Lots. The diagonal road near the top-left corner represents the streetcar line that would have taken golfers to Lakeview/Hillcrest and presumably to Charles Gordon’s proposed 36-hole course. Area inside thin green line is what would become Lakeview/Hillcrest Golf Club in 1921. Plat map shows only a handful of structures in this entire area in 1916, but 36 more holes of golf there seems implausible. Plat map courtesy of University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Library.
After all that, here, at least if you are interested in golf history, is the most curious sentence in the Minneapolis Star report: “C. Raynor will be employed as architect.”
C. Raynor? No, frankly, I don’t see that.
The “C” most certainly was a typographical error, and the Raynor reference should have been to “S.,” or “Seth,” or “nationally renowned golf course architect Seth Raynor.” There was in fact a direct connection between Seth Raynor and Charles Gordon. Raynor was the architect hired by Gordon and other Somerset members to design their Mendota Heights Club in 1919, and while in Minnesota during that time period, Raynor also designed Midland Hills in Rose Township (now Roseville), which opened for play in July 1921.
But I know of no connection between Raynor and a proposed golf course in northeastern St. Paul, and none of a handful of informed golf-history sources I talked with knew of one, either.
My bottom line, I guess, is that all of this is a certain amount of ado about nothing. I’m thinking Mr. Charles W. Gordon concocted some sort of brilliant-in-his-head plan in 1921, fed it to a Minneapolis reporter late that year, and that nothing tangible ever became of 36 holes and 2,000 members and Seth Raynor in Hayden Heights.
But it’s interesting to imagine.
Thanks to Minnesota History Center oral historian Ryan Barland for digging up the Minneapolis Star story on Gordon and golf.
Presenting a Minnesota golf mystery. See if you can figure this out faster than I did. Only took me two years.
Spoiler alert: I’ll be giving away the answer a few paragraphs hence. I guess that’ll take the “mystery” out of play, but whatever.
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Check out, from the Minnesota Golf Association’s archived membership rolls, this list of “St. Paul” golf clubs from 1921:
From Minnesota Golf Association archives.
Refrain from geographical nitpicking, please, and scroll down to the final entry. (I’ll do the nitpicking — Midland Hills is in Roseville, White Bear Yacht Club is in Dellwood, Northwood was in North St. Paul, Somerset is in Mendota Heights. Something tells me the MGA didn’t feel the need to be geographically precise in those days, and that’s fine.)
OK, final entry in the photo:
Lake View Golf & Country Club (ditto marks indicating St. Paul).
Lake View Golf & Country Club? In St. Paul?
Never heard of it. What lake, what view, what golf, what country club? It was a mystery to me when in 2017 I was offered a look at the MGA archives and noticed the entry.
Care to take a stab at it?
There aren’t that many lakeside areas in or very near St. Paul, so some possibilities are easily eliminated. Lake View couldn’t have been tied to Phalen Park; that club was established in 1917 and is listed in the MGA membership roll pictured above. Lake View wasn’t tied to Como; that golf club’s course opened in 1930.
So … Lake View?
With other priorities in play, I set Lake View on the back burner for a year and change, though it would occasionally resurface to vex me. But I never could think of a golf course, extant or extinct, in St. Paul or within a few miles of it, that could have been called Lake View.
Twitter lent an unwitting hand in solving the mystery.
This February, while having a Twitter exchange with a golf historian on an unrelated issue, he tweeted to me this photo, taken from a page in the 1922 American Annual Golf Guide:
This was presumably the same club as Lake View in the MGA membership roll. Lake View (or Lakeview) Golf & Country Club, found!
Well, sort of. Except there really was no where there in the golf-guide entry. With my curiosity again piqued, I was off to the Minnesota History Center in search of Lakeview Golf & Country Club’s still-mysterious location. I struck gold (my gold standard is a low one) on one of the first microfiched sports sections I spooled up.
From the St. Paul Sunday Pioneer Press of May 1, 1921, this (click on the image for a larger view):
“NEW GOLF COURSE WILL OPEN TODAY,” read the headline on the left side of the page.
“The Lakeview Golf & Country Club will entertain golfers of St. Paul today,” the story began. “… The Lakeview Club was organized by enthusiasts of the great Scottish pastime, who for the past two or three years have played on the Phalen municipal course. When the course became overcrowded , certain of its patrons decided to organize the Lakeview Club.
“An excellent strip of land in the northeast end of the city was purchased this spring and work on the first nine holes was started immediately. It is expected that before the close of the playing season that the limit of 200 members will have been …” (paragraph cuts off)
The rest of the article describes the course’s rolling terrain, elevated vantage points and various holes. Accompanying the story was a five-column map of the grounds and the routing. At the perimeters of the map are the giveaways. The course was bordered by Larpenteur Avenue on the north and Winthrop and East avenues on the west and east, respectively (East Avenue is now McKnight).
St. Paulites and many Minnesota golfers will recognize the description. Lakeview Golf & Country Club was what came to be known as Hillcrest.
More written history follows, but if you were familiar with Hillcrest Golf Club, you won’t want to miss the photo/map near the end of this post.
The history of Hillcrest Golf Club is mostly well-documented. It was best known as the east metro’s Jewish golf club for more than a half-century, although those Jewish roots were first established at nearby Northwood Country Club in North St. Paul, which opened in 1915. Northwood was abandoned in the 1940s, and some of its Jewish members soon purchased Hillcrest, which was a public course at the time. Hillcrest was sold to a local pipefitters union in 2011 and abandoned in 2017. Its grounds are now vacant.
But the genesis of Hillcrest — or Lakeview, at the start — is less well known. There are no club documents from its earliest years, I’ve been told, and the only mentions of the club before it was launched that I know of are the aforementioned 1921 reference to Phalen golfers seeking a valve for overcrowding and a reference in a Minneapolis Tribune story from the same year suggesting the new Lakeview club was private. But it isn’t impossible to cobble together a short history of Hillcrest-when-it-was-Lakeview.
The Pioneer Press of April 24, 1921, touted the impending start of the golf season. The headline: “St. Paul to Have Two New Golf Clubs Equaling Best in the West.” The first of these was University Golf Club, which soon would be renamed Midland Hills and, through the talents of noted golf architect Seth Raynor (identified as “Rayner” and “Raymore” in the Pioneer Press story), would indeed become a regionally prominent golf club.
The second club mentioned was Lakeview, and though as Hillcrest it also would become a golf course of distinction, it is unlikely, considering its staggering pace-of-construction timeline, that it began as one.
“Lakeview golfers believe they have set a record in course construction,” a note at the end of the April 14 story reads. “On April 6 work was started on the first ten holes of their new course in Hayden Heights, and on April 10, players used the course for the first time. The record seems a remarkable one. The remaining eight holes will be constructed soon.”
I never did track down under whose breakneck-paced guidance the routing, tree-stump pulling, grading, fairway canting, bunkering and greens swaling of Lakeview was first engineered (yes, that’s gentle sarcasm). However, those who have played Hillcrest will note that the routing shown in the 1921 Pioneer Press map is different from what they played, and it apparently took only months for the membership to ponder a redesign of Five-Day Lakeview.
“Lakeview club golfers are planning to make an 18-hole course of their links,” read the opening of a story in the July 31, 1921, Pioneer Press. “… Tom Vardon, White Bear professional, will be in charge of operations which will get under way at the earliest possible moment.”
Vardon, who was the head professional at White Bear Yacht Club and designer of more than 40 Upper Midwest courses, is cited in almost all credible references as the original designer of Hillcrest Golf Club. It would be needless nitpicking to challenge that, so I won’t. “Mr. Vardon was impressed with the turf covering the tract and declared that it is of a variety that takes years to develop,” the Pioneer Press story continued. “The second nine holes will be constructed on land that has been under cultivation for years and must be plowed and seeded.”
The bulk of the Vardon re-routing of Lakeview lasted for decades, albeit with revisions under the direction of A.W. Tillinghast in 1936-37. The club’s name didn’t last nearly as long.
The Pioneer Press referred to the club as Lakeview for the rest of 1921 and in tournaments in April and May of 1922. On May 14, 1922, the newspaper reported that the clubhouse would be moved closer to Larpenteur Avenue at the club’s northern edge.
More references to Lakeview are found in July and August of 1922 and early April 1923. But on April 22, 1923, a Pioneer Press story mentioned a new watering system that had been installed at “Hillcrest,” and from that point, the club was listed as Hillcrest whenever I found a printed mention. I found no information on reasons behind the name change.
Which brings up a point I and others wondered about: What lake gave Lakeview its name?
The reference most likely was to Beaver Lake, one mile south of the midpoint of the Lakeview/Hillcrest grounds. However, none of the Hillcrest-connected folks I talked with said Hillcrest offered a view of Beaver Lake, though most conceded that there might have been such a view in the course’s less-densely wooded 1920s. On the other hand, a mid-1920s St. Paul fire insurance map designates the Beaver Lake area as “slough” with only a small body of water, and a 1923 aerial photo supports that designation. A 1945 aerial photo shows another body of water just off the southeast corner of the Lakeview/Hillcrest grounds, in what is now Maplewood (it is largely marshland now), but that appeared to be more pond-sized than lake-sized.
Beaver Lake, Maplewood
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St. Paul resident Ross Walkowiak, who is well-versed in Minnesota golf history and far more adept technologically than I am, put together a graphic piece that should be of interest to anyone who was familiar with the routing of Hillcrest Golf Club. It shows an aerial photo of Hillcrest at the time of its closing in 2017, superimposed in red with the routing of Lakeview/Hillcrest’s original nine holes in 1921 plus the original proposed routing of a second nine. For reference, Larpenteur Avenue is the street at the top of the photo.
Courtesy of Ross Walkowiak
Below is a 1923 aerial photo of the Lakeview/Hillcrest and part of the Hayden Heights areas of St. Paul. The golf course is at the far right side of the photo, basically from top to bottom. There is a diagonal street at the top-left of the photo. I believe this was Furness Avenue, now Furness Trail/Furness Parkway, which was the streetcar line referenced in the American Annual Golf Guide entry and which would have provided transportation to and from the golf course. The streetcar line ran as far northeast as White Bear Lake and Mahtomedi, connecting with the famed Wildwood Amusement Park.
Below is a 1945 aerial photo of the Hillcrest Golf Club area. This photo and the previous one are courtesy of the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library.
Other Lakeview/Hillcrest notes:
— Carl Lindgren was the first professional at Lakeview. Lindgren was most notably known as a longtime pro at Visalia, Calif., and also had positions in Detroit Lakes, Minn., and Mandan, N.D., where he died at age 61 in 1956.
— In late 2017, as Hillcrest was closing down, I invited readers to share their memories of the club. I’m inviting them again, either via this story or via the link in this paragraph.
Natalie Klasinski tees off on the 18th hole at Hillcrest Golf Club in 2017. (Valerie Reichel photo)
Soon-to-be-published post: An intriguing Hillcrest-area report that never came to fruition.
Thanks to those who contributed information and even speculation on early Lakeview/Hillcrest, including Ross Walkowiak, Dan Kelly, Rick Shefchik, Doug Mangine, John Hamburger and Mike Manthey.
Golf has had many wonderful and skilled caddies. Among the pantheon of the all-time greats are the likes of Angelo Argea (Jack Nicklaus), Herman Mitchell (Lee Trevino), Fanny Sunnesson (Nick Faldo) and Steve Williams (Tiger Woods).
Before that, there was Robert Overgaard.
Hold on. I never said Overgaard belonged among those legendary loopers. I just said, before that …
Robert Overgaard caddied as a youth at one of Fergus Falls’ two known lost golf courses — Riverside Links (Minnesota lost course No. 204) — and today, at age 89, would have to be one of the very few remaining Fergus Falls citizens who has firsthand memories of the course, which was situated along the south bank of the Otter Tail River just less than a mile southwest of downtown and had a nice run for a lost course, 1922 to 1940.
Overgaard’s memories of Riverside include a fellow named Tomhave who was the club’s best player despite using only irons and who thought Overgaard was a darn good caddie.
“I caddied for Tomhave, and he used me as sort of a rabbit’s foot, “Overgaard said by phone from Fergus Falls. “I had a butch, and the first time I ever caddied for him he had a real good score, and so after that, he wanted me to caddie. He’d rub my head and say, ‘Hey, come over here, I got a tough shot here’ and he’d rub my butch haircut.”
Overgaard laughed, the distant past still worth a good chuckle.
With the help of Overgaard’s memory and a smattering of old newspaper stories, an attempt at reconstructing the Riverside course can be made (the Otter Tail County Historical Society has more newspaper stories, for anyone interested in a deeper dive):
“Fergus Golf Course Ready,” proclaimed a headline in the April 29, 1922, edition of the Fergus Falls Journal. “Golf is something new in Fergus Falls,” the story began (not true; more on that to come). The nine-hole course covered 65 acres of farmland west of Park Region College, which later would become Hillcrest Lutheran Academy. “It is decidedly rolling (Overgaard pointed out that the terrain is much flatter today), giving players all the uphill and downhill that anyone could want.
“The river banks on the course afford a wonderful view of the city and a view of the Pisgah Dam and the lake above the green.”
Kenneth Fairbairn was placed in charge of the course, which to its significant credit featured grass greens. I say significant, because many 1920s-era courses in Minnesota’s smaller towns had sand greens, which were both cheaper and inferior to grass greens. But Fergus Falls had a population of 7,581 in 1920 and a well-established group of businessmen and professionals who could make a grass-greens golf course financially viable. Three doctors – H.A. Anderson, W.L. Peterson and H.J. Laffitte — were either officers or on the board of directors.
Riverside’s business structure was unusual. “It is probably the only golf course in the state that is not operated by a golf club,” the Minneapolis Tribune reported on May 13, 1928. “The Riverside Links, Inc., is a corporation of local citizens interested in golf and aiming to stimulate interest in golf, but it operates as a public golf corporation and not a club. It has leased the 65 acre course for a period of 20 years. … It relies on the sale of playing privileges entirely for its revenue.”
Overgaard’s recollection is that the Riverside plot was owned by Elmer Adams, a senator, editor and owner of much land in Fergus Falls, and the suggestion is that Adams leased the land to the golf corporation.
Overgaard did not remember the golf course’s entire routing but said the clubhouse lay near a grove of Russian olive trees just south of the river, he estimated 200 to 300 yards west of the westernmost building on the current Hillcrest Lutheran campus. “The site of the clubhouse is relatively intact,” he said.
Incidentally, the Hillcrest Lutheran Academy Comets and their football-playing brethren in the Little Eight Conference heap indignity upon the former Riverside grounds each autumn by clomping up and down the school’s football-stadium turf. Overgaard said Riverside’s first fairway would have lain right about where Westside Drive is, with the football stadium grounds perhaps at the edge of the fairway or just into the rough. (Don’t sweat it, Comets. March on.)
The first hole, Overgaard said, finished just north of Alcott Avenue, which today is farther south than it was in the 1920s and ’30s. Alcott was the course’s southern border. The course then proceeded west and north, to within perhaps 100 yards of the Pisgah Dam, and then returned home to the east. A 1939 aerial photo indicates a ninth hole alongside the Otter Tail River, probably a long dogleg, and Overgaard remembered that hooked shots could reach a watery grave.
Riverside Golf Links, Fergus Falls. 1939 aerial photo from University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. The Otter Tail River is to the north, Alcott Avenue to the south. The golf course would still have been in play at the time of this photo, and a number of green sites and hole routings are clearly visible (click on the image for a larger view).
Overgaard caddied during the Riverside course’s latter years. “It was quite nicely kept up,” he said. “The golf course was in many ways (supported by) the efforts of the businessmen to get golf established in town. It was a civic effort and got a lot of people in town interested in the game. It was only nine holes and was boxed in. … When it was gaining some momentum in the town, it became apparent they had to move.”
A site 2.8 miles southeast of downtown became the next home to golf in Fergus Falls. In 1941, Pebble Lake Golf Course opened along the southwestern shore of Pebble Lake. Its 18-hole layout was designed by probably Minnesota’s highest-profile golf course architect at the time, Paul Coates, whose design credits also include Keller in Maplewood, Stillwater Country Club and Pine Beach West at Madden’s in East Gull Lake.
PREQUEL
Riverside was not Fergus Falls’ first lost golf course, not by a long shot. That distinction belongs to a layout that preceded Riverside by more than two decades and remains largely a mystery.
The Fergus Falls Journal announced the arrival of organized golf in town on May 2, 1901. “A number of golf players have been out nearly every evening, and the game promises to be a very popular one during the coming summer,” the newspaper reported.
On May 6, the Minneapolis Journal chimed in. “Golf at Fergus Falls,” read a small headline. “The local golf club, which has just been organized, has laid out its links … and the game promises to be a very popular one this summer. A dozen enthusiasts have been practicing industriously during the past week and a large number have ordered outfits and signified their intent of joining the club.”
A more formal report came by way of the Fergus Falls Weekly. A May 23, 1901, meeting was called at the First National Bank for the purpose of “improvement of the greens.” On May 25, the Weekly reported that the Fergus Golf Club (lost course No. 205) had been organized the day before. “The game has awakened great interest here and starts out with twenty-five charter members.”
Those charter members included:
— Robert Hannah, club president, who likely knew his cleeks from his spoons as a native Scot. He was born in Ayrshire County, Scotland, in 1860, the same year the first Open championship was played at Prestwick, less than five miles from Ayrshire. Just up the road from Prestwick are two other famed golf clubs, Royal Troon and Kilmarnock. Hannah was a director of Fergus Falls’ First National Bank and is the namesake of Robert Hannah Recreational Area, alongside the Otter Tail River and just a couple of hundred yards east of the former Riverside Links grounds.
— Dr. J.G. Vigen, who as a native Norwegian perhaps didn’t own the golfing pedigree of Hannah but who certainly held stature in Fergus Falls.
Vigen and Hannah later would become charter members at the Riverside course.
Those are the known properties of Fergus Golf Club. Unfortunately, much is unknown. My guess is that the club lasted only through the 1901 season, as I could not find any references to it in searching Fergus Falls newspapers of 1902, ’03 or ’05. In any event, Fergus holds standing in Minnesota golf history. According to my research and records, it was among the first 15 golf courses built in Minnesota and among the first three built west of St. Cloud, rivaled only by Ada Golf Club (1900) and Marshall Golf Club (also 1901).
Also unknown was the Fergus Club’s course location — and there are apparent contradictions here. The Minneapolis Journal reported that the club “has laid out its links in the southwestern part of the city.” The Fergus Falls Daily Journal reported, “The links are in the vicinity of the Jefferson school building,” which was decidedly not near the southwestern part of the city but instead was more northeast, near Mount Faith and Springen avenues. The most concrete reference, however, lends credence to the southwestern notion. “The tennis court at the corner of Vernon and Union Avenues is a thing of the past,” Wheelock’s Weekly of Fergus Falls reported on May 9, 1901. “Golf promises to supplant tennis almost entirely in this neighborhood.” The intersection of Vernon and Union lies near the current southwestern corner of downtown Fergus Falls and a quarter-mile east of Robert Hannah Recreational Area.
Golf was part of Fergus Falls’ consciousness as early as 1901, as displayed by this ad from April 29, 1901. (From Minnesota Historical Society holdings)
Time should have been on the side of Orchard Beach and Golf Club.
The 1920s were a wonderful time for golf — a boom time. A Minnesota chronology of golf courses published in 2002 lists 71 courses built in the 1920s, and in fact many more that were built weren’t counted in the chronology because they had been long-since abandoned. My best guess is that well over 100 Minnesota golf courses witnessed their first shank-and-a-triple-bogey in the ’20s.
Why all of this building? It was the economy, stu … oh, never mind, no name-calling today. The decade was called the Roaring Twenties for a reason. The middle class for the first time had enough expendable income to take up golf, the wealthy had more means with which to launch courses, and experts and novices alike had access to loading up the Hupmobile with hickory shafts and heading to the first tee.
Community courses, whether municipal or privately owned, popped up almost everywhere. Resort courses appeared, too, whether or not they were established for the purpose of attracting out-of-town golfers. Among them: Breezy Point (1920), Ruttger’s Bay (1922) and Tianna (1925), to name just three. Edina Country Club, originally named Thorpe Country Club and then simply The Country Club, was founded in 1923, a bauble for a large housing development built to accommodate and entertain Twin Cities suburbanites. The golf course and the city’s Country Club District became rousing successes.
So, why not Orchard Beach?
One would think, among this boom, there would have been opportunity for a place like Orchard Beach Golf and Country Club. The project was ambitious but the goal sensible: to build a golf-and-housing development less than 20 miles from downtown Minneapolis in northwestern Lakeville.
Orchard Beach and Golf Club did in fact get off the ground — like one of those 10-winged contraptions you see in old aviation films that lifts off for two seconds before folding up into a garbage heap. The project lasted less than two years and carved onto the Lakeville landscape little more than a small building, a couple of roads and a few strips of cleared land.
The question is, why did it fail?
Afraid I don’t have a good answer. Leo Harmon is the person who would know, but he left us 66 years ago.
Orchard Beach and GC presumably was the brainchild of one Leo Clinton Harmon, a Michigander who left his positions of stature to move to Minnesota in 1926. A former bank president, lumber magnate and entrepreneur (shoes, leather, electricity and baby carriages, among other ventures) in Schoolcraft County of the Upper Peninsula, Harmon left the small city of Manistique in ’26 and, according to a resume’, “moved to Minneapolis to engage in some special reorganization work for the Backus-Brooks Co., and the International Paper Company.” (The resume’ was “prepared by a friend of Mr. Harmon,” apparently published in 1929 and forwarded to me by the Gulliver Historical Society, which is in Schoolcraft County. Marilyn Fischer, president of the Gulliver HS, wrote in correspondence that Harmon is considered one of the “Great Men in Manistique’s History,” and regard for Harmon was so great that one publication held that Harmon claimed to have first devised the use of white safety stripes on highways.)
Leo Harmon, Ancestry.com image via Gulliver (Mich.) Historical Society
Harmon, though a native South Dakotan, former Montanan and longtime Michigander, was familiar with Minnesota. His father was Capt. William Harmon, who served in the famed First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the U.S. Civil War. Leo’s grandfather, Allen Harmon, lived in St. Anthony and Minneapolis, and the Harmon Place Historic District in Minneapolis is named after him. William Harmon operated steamboats between Minneapolis and Anoka and owned the Mississippi River steamer H.M. Rice.
If there were motives for Harmon, at age 54, to emerge from the Upper Michigan forest, where he presumably was wealthy and at least regionally renowned, and move to Minnesota, they are unclear. There is record of him having visited St. Paul on a business trip in 1924; its exact aims are unknown. But at some point, he turned his eyes toward a wooded, lakeside plot in Lakeville, at the time a small town of only about 500.
In October 1926, Harmon, along with Charles R. Hutchenson and M.P. LaFleur of Minneapolis, established Minnesota Lakes Inc. Real Estate, with a charter in Delaware. I failed to dig up any background on Hutcheson, but M.P. LaFleur presumably was Maynard Potter LaFleur, a World War I aviator and former professional hockey player from Eveleth, Minn., who was described in a 1982 Minneapolis Tribune story as a “real estate wheeler-dealer.” He also was dubbed “the Duke of Marquette” because he owned so much land on Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis.
On March 7, 1927, a plat map covering part of the area near Orchard Lake in Lakeville was filed with Dakota County. The area was called Club Park Addition No. 1 of Orchard Beach and Golf Club and included features hearkening back to British literature: Tennyson Court, Burns Plaza, and streets named Longfellow, Byron, Emerson and Milton, among others. (Irony: Wasn’t it Milton who wrote “Paradise Lost”?)
Courtesy Dakota County Historical Society
The first newspaper mention of Orchard Beach and Golf Club that I can find came in the June 11, 1927, edition of the Minneapolis Tribune, with a large advertisement detailing a proposed development with golfing, fishing, tennis, playgrounds and more — “An Ideal Family Private Playground. … Now Being Organized.” The ad featured a listing of advisory board members, with Harmon at the top:
“Mr. Leo C. Harmon, 185 Oak Grove St., Minneapolis, chairman, Inland Water Ways Commission; president of Tri-State Tractor Company; president of Minnesota Lakes, Inc. as sponsors of Orchard Beach and golf club; also president until recently of the First State Bank, Manistique, Michigan.”
Among the nine other advisory board members were D.C. Bennett, Minneapolis architect; Chris Whitman, manager of The Minikahda Club in Minneapolis (Minikahda Club records list Whitman as its manager from 1916-28); and James Corr of Minneapolis, an architect and civil engineer who coincidentally was listed as surveyor of the Orchard Beach property in the aforementioned plat map.
The day after the ad appeared, the Minneapolis Tribune of June 12, 1927, published a short story headlined “Orchard Club Will Feature Recreation.” “Approximately 1,000 acres of land are being developed for the Orchard Beach and Golf Club, 17 miles from Minneapolis,” the story began. “A feature of the project will be an 18-hole golf course. Charles Harney of Chicago, amateur champion of upper Michigan, is here to lay out the course.”
There is a possible Harney-Harmon connection here. Harney lived in Escanaba, Mich., an hour’s drive from Harmon in Manistique, and won the 1921 Upper Peninsula Golf Association championship. The proposed routing of the Orchard Beach golf course, presumably executed by Harney, appears solid from a golf standpoint, and the prospects were promising, given the varied terrain.
I was unable, however, to find any evidence that Harmon ever did any other golf-course design work.
As mentioned in my previous post on Orchard Beach, it’s clear that work on the golf course and development started in 1926 or 1927, with some land cleared for roads and golf holes. It’s also clear that work stopped abruptly, probably not even 10 percent in. The most plausible explanation is money, that Harmon and/or his investors ran into issues that killed the development. Yet there is no verifiable indication that that was the case.
Leo Harmon moved on from Minnesota. Quickly, it seems. The resume’ prepared by his friend lists him as president of the Mid-West Tractor Company of Chicago from 1927-29. “In the spring of 1929,” the resume reads, “he sold his interest in that business and at the request of Colonel Francis Knox the General-manager of the 28 Hearst (news)papers, he was retained to assist in the needed re-organization of the Hearst South Street plant in New York City where Mr. Harmon served for about two years as the Asst. Business-manager of the New York Evening Journal.”
The resume’ ends at that point. Harmon moved to California sometime in the 1930s and died at age 80 on May 25, 1952, in Beverly Hills.
By then, Orchard Lake and Golf Club was a most distant memory, long since abaondoned.
On a warm September afternoon, sunny and calm and a blue-ribbon day for golf, I drive south on I-35E, through Burnsville, past the freeway’s east-west merger onto I-35, past Buck Hill, take the next exit and find myself in Lakeville.
I hop off the freeway, head south a half-mile, and pull into the spot where the clubhouse is.
Or was, I guess.
I know it should be here, on this very spot, because I have studied this area closely online for more than a year.
Only … no clubhouse. Instead, the sign on the door reads:
“Chipotle.”
Thrown off, I stop to regroup. I walk in the door and stride up to the counter.
Me: “Can I just have a small soda?”
Worker: “Two dollars and four cents.”
Me: “And the 2:44 tee time.”
Pause.
Worker: “Sorry?”
Me: “Never mind.”
I got the soda. Not the tee time.
Then again, no one ever did.
Here is an aerial view of 17599 Kenwood Trail in Lakeville, home to the burrito bowls and carnitas of Chipotle Mexican Grill. Red “C” marks the spot:
Below is the same spot, some years earlier. Seventy-three years earlier, to be precise. Again, red “C” marks the spot in this 1945 aerial photo. Only this time, “C” does not stand for Chipotle:
And below one more time, a 1927 newspaper ad promoting development of the immediate area. This time, there is an inscription next to the red “C”. Inscription reads “Golf Club House.”
This, just to the west of the flagpole, was to be the point of departure for 18 holes at Orchard Beach and Golf Club in northwestern Lakeville. But the flag, it is presumed, was never raised, and Orchard Beach instead ranks as the most unheard-of and mysterious lost-golf course site (almost-lost, to be perfectly accurate) I have come across.
A larger look at what was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club:
This is the top portion of an advertisement that appeared in the June 11, 1927, issue of the Minneapolis Tribune. The ad occupied two-thirds of a page. You can click on it to see more detail.
The preceding October, another ad had appeared in the Tribune. “Orchard Beach and Golf Club,” read the large type. In smaller type, the ad crowed: “The Most FASCINATING and SCENIC PLAYGROUND That Has Ever Been Opened to the Public.”
Hyperbole has always been a staple in golf-course promotion. This was hyperbole on Roaring Twenties steroids.
The crowing added up to a veritable din when weighed with the full ad:
These ads were just two in a series that blitzed readers of the Minneapolis Tribune in 1926 and ’27 — at least nine large display ads in June and July of 1927, plus a handful from earlier in ’27 used to recruit a sales force. Orchard Beach and Golf Club, the ads suggested, would be nothing like Twin Citians had ever seen. And it wasn’t just golf and a lake that were proffered to reader/buyers. Other ads and newspaper stories promised tennis, playgrounds, an athletic field, parks, an aviation field and a large residential development — all situated, according to an October 1926 ad, “amid rolling hills generously wooded with the virgin growth of beautiful hardwood trees and a myriad of the various wild flowers painted by Dame Nature.”
OK then.
Orchard Beach — the club, golf course and housing development — was to have encompassed an area that is loosely bordered, in 2018 terms, by Kenwood Trail on the east, 172nd Street West on the north, the southeast corner of Orchard Lake on the northwest and 185th Street West on the south. The western border likely includes parts of at least three holes on what is now Brackett’s Crossing Country Club (nee Honeywell Country Club, established in 1961). Within those proposed Orchard Beach and Golf Club confines, there is now a large, upscale residential area to the immediate east and northeast of Brackett’s Crossing, including Prairie Lake Park; the Queen Anne Courts mobile home neighborhood; and a less densely developed section of homes and hobby farm-ish land along 172nd Street and near Orchard Lake. Orchard Beach’s golf course was to be built mostly in the latter two areas.
Orchard Beach Park, Lakeville, May 2018
But the surf ‘n’ turf that was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club never quite worked out. No tee time was ever reserved, no ace served, no seesaw seen, no aerial landing landed. I can find no documentation of the project dating to 1928 or later, and the project is so unknown that one might as well suggest the Loch Ness monster once inhabited Orchard Lake as to suggest there ever were big plans for the neighborhood. I contacted or tried to contact three historical societies, one courthouse and at least a dozen residents or former residents of the area, including at least three parties who live smack-dab on top of what was to be the golf course, and never heard so much as a whisper of knowledge of the Orchard Beach project.
Yet the current lie of the land indicates site work was started, and documents confirm it.
“A sporty 18 hole golf course is under construction,” read part of a June 1927 ad in the Minneapolis Tribune. That same month, the Tribune ran a story headlined “Orchard Club Will Feature Recreation.”
“Approximately 1,000 acres of land are being developed for the Orchard Beach and Golf Club, on Lyndale avenue south, 17 miles from Minneapolis,” the story read. “The project is planned as one of the most completely equipped private recreational grounds in the northwest. The work has been under way since last fall.”
Orchard Beach would not have been Lakeville’s first golf course. The 1920s marked the heyday of golf at Antlers Park Golf Links, an offshoot of the popular Antlers Park Amusement Park owned by George O’Rourke on the southeastern shore of Lake Marion, only three miles southeast of Orchard Lake. In August 1927, as construction of the Orchard Beach course presumably was underway, the Dakota County Tribune ran a story under the headline “Antlers Golf Course Is Attracting More City Artists,” and noting the Antlers Park course had been expanded from nine to 18 holes. (The Antlers Park course closed in 1938.)
It’s likely that Antlers Park and Orchard Beach would not have been direct competitors. Antlers was a public course, while Orchard Beach would presumably have been private, limited to paying members of the club, or perhaps open to the public but at a higher greens fee.
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Orchard Beach and Golf Club is, to steal without apologies to Sir Winston Churchill, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It’s 99 percent certain that the project started, but it’s even more certain it was never finished. As with any worth-its-salt mystery, clues have been left. Some are stored in aerial photos.
What follows is something of a time-lapse sequence of the area southwest of Orchard Lake, i.e. the proposed home to Orchard Beach and Golf Club. No aerial photos before the mid-1930s are readily available, so the 1927 proposed development, shown earlier, can be used as the earliest reference point.
In 1937, this is how the area looked. Though the Orchard Beach project had presumably been abandoned for a decade by then, clear signs of it remain. I marked the general confines of the proposed development with a red border and letter-coded other notable landmarks, either likely or speculative. (All but one aerial photo in this post are courtesy of the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. Click on the images for closer looks.)
L — Lyndale Avenue. At the time, this was the main drag out of downtown Minneapolis, through Bloomington, across the Minnesota River and south to Lakeville.
R – Railroad. This was the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern Railway. In the 1920s, it was known as the Dan Patch Railroad, an electric and then steam line whose stops included Antlers Park.
C – Orchard Beach and Golf Club clubhouse. I have no verification that this building was in fact the clubhouse, but its location is a near-exact match with the drawing in the 1927 Minneapolis Tribune ad.
R2 – Road. And nothing more, really, except one of the clearest indications that work had been done on the Orchard Beach development. The road marked the southern edge of the proposed golf course, traveled west, turned north, and eventually connected with 172nd Street West. In the 1927 ad, the road can clearly be seen cutting through the middle of the proposed development.
O and BP — Orchard Lake and what the developers dubbed Orchard Lake Beach Park. Today, Orchard Beach Park lies in almost exactly the same place.
S – Streets — or, more accurately, proposed streets. Compare the pattern of rectangles with the same in the Tribune ad. No houses are apparent along these rectangular lines, but the lines do indicate that land was cleared for the purpose of putting in streets.
Moving along to 1945:
What’s notable in the eight years since the 1937 photo? Not all that much, except for notable improvement in the resolution of aerial photography. But this land stayed largely the same, except for more development to the east of Lyndale Avenue. This photo lends veracity to the notion that land had been cleared almost 20 years earlier for the purposes of building a golf course. I sketched the proposed routing on this photo, in green lines that correspond to the 1927 drawing. Best guess is that land was cleared for about half the course in 1926 and ’27 before the project was stopped for unknown reasons. This sketched routing is entirely plausible for the path of a reputable 18-hole golf course, and an accomplished (not renowned) golfer was hired to design the course. I will post more about the project’s principals shortly.
Click for a larger look at the photo and see if you know anyone who might have lived on one of these “holes.”
By 1957 (below), U.S. Highway 65 had been built; it cut through the southeastern corner of what was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club. Within a decade, the route would become I-35:
A look at 1964:
A few more roads had been built near Orchard Lake; the road that cut through the south side of the property had effectively disappeared; and, most notably, the mobile home park now known as Queen Anne Courts had been built near I-35, between Lyndale Avenue and the defunct railroad line.
Finally, 2018 (U.S. Geological Survey photo):
O – Orchard Lake
G – Area of proposed Orchard Beach golf course
B – Brackett’s Crossing Country Club
C – Chipotle/Orchard Beach and Golf Club clubhouse
Next post: The people behind Orchard Beach and Golf Club and the mystery of its demise.
