All posts by Joe Bissen

About Joe Bissen

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.

Hutchinson Golf Club and its closest of relatives

Lost golf courses, ,

Next time you drive through west-central Minnesota and find yourself in the city of Hutchinson, turn north on California Street and head up to its intersection with 8th Avenue Northwest.

Goodness’ sake, don’t stop. Just drive past casually, don’t pull over, don’t knock on any doors, don’t draw any attention to yourself or the peace-seeking residents.

This is history, but no one has to know it.

No one has to care, either. And very few probably will. But I’ll fill you in anyway.

The intersection of California and 8th signals of one of the more unusual convergence of golf-course sites in Minnesota. That’s because you can look one way — just a few yards to the east — and see where ladies and gentlemen with hickory-shafted MacGregors used to four-putt the old sand green at Hutchinson Golf Club, or you can drive a few hundred more yards north on California, zip into a parking space at Country Club Manor apartments — don’t take a resident’s parking spot! — get out, and take a gander at Hutchinson GC’s immediate successor: Crow River Country Club.

Among Minnesota’s 200-plus lost golf courses, I can think of no other place where a golf club abandoned a course in one place and reopened so nearby, yet not on the same site, and not to mention so soon.

Have a look:

1940 aerial photo: grounds of Hutchinson Golf Club, designated “A,” and Crow River Country Club, designated “B.” The thin vertical line near the “A” is what would become California Street, with the golf course — it had been abandoned for one year at the time of this photo — to the right (east). The Crow River site, in the rectangle marked “B” and only nine holes at the time, is in its infancy, with Campbell Lake to the left (west). The “A” site can be distinguished as a golf course by bright, white circles, some of which were sand greens. Twin Oaks Apartments & Townhomes occupies much of that site today. Downtown Hutchinson is just off the bottom-right corner of the photo. (Courtesy University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Library. Click on the photo for a closer look.)

Incidentally, a third golf course — and second of the lost variety — also lies only a couple of hundred yards away. The Meadow Links course (1999-circa 2015) was just across McLeod County Highway 12, or Golf Course Road, from both the Hutchinson GC site and Crow River CC.

Hutchinson Golf Club got its start on the “California Street” site — albeit there was no such street at the time — in the late 1920s. On April 25, 1926, the Minneapolis Tribune reported, “The Hutchinson golf club has leased 35 acres of ground from D.S. Todd, about a mile west of the city, and will lay out a first class golf course. The officers of the club plan to have an expert here soon to lay out the course. The land is ideal, rolling and with good natural hazards.”

Typically, a new golf course would take about one season to grow in and be ready for play. That appeared to be the case in Hutchinson. A story in the May 22, 1927, Minneapolis Tribune again mentioned the purchase of the Todd land and a golf course of nine holes, par 34, 2,400 yards long, with sand traps and bunkers, a toolhouse and rain shelter and “a competent caretaker.” E.S. Noreen was club president, and the Leader reported that a flock of sheep would graze the site.

On June 17, 1927, the Hutchinson Leader reported that a club tournament would be held two days hence, with a fee of 25 cents for “eight holes.” The suspicion here is that the number of holes was misstated, because on June 24, the Leader reported that 23 players participated, with Charles Borkenhagen low man with a 43 “for nine holes.”

And here, an admission: Although it’s almost certain that golf in Hutchinson formally began a decade earlier, I whiffed on confirming that. The May Minneapolis Tribune story ran under the headline “Hutchinson Golf Club Enters Second Decade” but made no mention of a course that would have preceded the one on the Todd land. A source in the city said there had indeed been a predecessor, and that there was written confirmation of it, but no one ever got back to me with such confirmation. An update on this paragraph is at the end of the story.

Hutchinson Golf Club — on the Todd site — had about 75 members in 1926, the Leader reported. Play continued there through the 1930s. In 1932, new bunkers were added, and a membership drive brought in players from the nearby cities of Brownton, Glencoe, Stewart and Buffalo Lake. In May 1934, a clubhouse was moved from the site “of the old Triple L Hatchery to the southwest corner of the course at the No. 1 tee,” the Leader reported. This would have been near the current home of Hutchinson Auto Sales, just north of 4th Avenue Southwest/Highways 7 and 22. The caretaker in 1934 was Richard Ahlbrecht, and club president was Dr. W.L. Bahr.

The late 1930s brought about an itch to move.

“Golf Club Has Plans Ready,” the Leader reported on April 15, 1938.  Work was expected to start by May 1 on a new site, northwest of the Todd site and near Campbell Lake, and “a total of $6,000 was subscribed to build the new course.”

The previous month, the Leader had reported that Earle M. Barrows, “an expert in golf course construction,” had visited Hutchinson and obtained a contour map of the 54.5-acre plot owned by the W.E. Harrington estate on which a new course would be built, “with watered greens and fairways, and grass greens.”

Barrows had a solid golf background. He was in the real estate business, according to a 1920 Minneapolis city directory, and in 1923 was elected chairman of Bloomington Golf Club as that club evolved from the Automobile Club of Minneapolis. Bloomington GC, now known as Minnesota Valley, was the product of famed golf course designer Seth Raynor (a notion that, to be fair, is disputed by some golf historians, though there is little question Raynor’s influence came into play at Bloomington GC). Barrows also was an early golf turfgrass expert and collaborated with J.A. Hunter of Minneapolis to lay out the now-lost Hilltop Golf Links course in Columbia Heights (1926-46).

In July 1938, construction of the greens at the new Hutchinson course was in full force. The greens, the Leader reported, were to be seeded between Aug. 15 and Sept. 1 with Northern Bent grass. “The show green, No. 5, at the approach to the course, will be 7,000 square feet in size,” the newspaper reported. “With favorable conditions the course will be ready for play next summer, and all observers say it will be among the most beautiful and picturesque in the state.”

The new course, renamed Crow River Country Club by the Hutchinson GC members, opened in May 1939.  The Leader reported that it was 3,155 yards long, par 36, with these hole yardages: 360, 177, 446, 300, 200, 460, 415, 385 and 412. “Several greens are in the woods,” the newspaper said, “and the entire course overlooks the lake.” Edwin Nurse was retained as one caretaker, and Harvey Hoff was brought on as another. Work was being started on a clubhouse measuring 24 by 56 feet.

Crow River CC staged its first shortstop tournament on June 25, with an entry fee of $1. Entrants were from Hutchinson, Brownton, Buffalo, Buffalo Lake, Cokato, Dassel, Glencoe, Stewart and Winthrop. Cliff Popp won, with nine-hole rounds of 44, 43 and 43.

In 1978, Crow River expanded to the 18-hole layout it is today.

Update, May 2019: I found an update on the history of golf in Hutchinson in the “McLeod County History Book” of 1978. It identifies the city’s first lost golf course, plus one other that doesn’t quite meet muster as a full-fledged course (has to have at least six holes, in my opinion).

Golf in Hutchinson began, the history book reports, with four or five holes in a pasture on the Ingebretsen farm about three miles east of Hutchinson, southeast of a farmhouse bordering the Great Northern railroad tracks. In October 1923, a meeting was held to discuss renting land on the Herman Schmidt farm 2.5 miles northwest of town, on the northwestern shore of Otter Lake. That course’s first tournament was held on June 15, 1924 (making Hutchinson Golf Club I Minnesota lost course No. 207 on my list).

1916 plat map of area around northern Otter Lake in Hutchinson. The plot in red was owned by F. Schmidt and — best guess — is where the first full-fledged golf course in Hutchinson lay. Plat map from John Borchert Map Library, University of Minnesota.

Jimmy Johnston and the 1929 U.S. Amateur: One more thing

Golf history

Watching this year’s U.S. Amateur wind down to the final match (Devon Bling vs. Viktor Hovland) at Pebble Beach Golf Links, it’s hard for me to take my eyes off the unrelenting beauty of the golf course and Monterey Bay. It’s also hard for me, when the coverage turns to the final hole, to take my eyes off the spot, a little more than halfway up No. 18, from where St. Paul’s Jimmy Johnston hit the Shot on the Rocks that helped propel him to victory in the 1929 U.S. Amateur.

I wrote about Johnston’s historic shot in last week’s St. Paul Pioneer Press — twincities.com/2018/08/11/shot-on-the-rocks-st-paul-golfer-jimmy-johnstons-quest-to-win-a-major-championship/ — and keep thinking about Johnston and his caddie standing on the rocks 89 years ago and sizing up the recovery shot that led to a par and the halve of the hole in Johnston’s championship match against Oscar Willing (Johnston ultimately won, 4 and 3).

Oh, about that caddie …

A phone call last week from a Johnston family member called my attention to a piece of Pebble Beach-U.S. Amateur trivia.

The fellow standing alongside Johnston in the 1929 final was a Pebble Beach caddie named Dede Gonsalves. When the U.S. Amateur returned to Pebble in 1961, a 21-year-old from Upper Arlington, Ohio, arrived at the tournament and, according to the story I was told, went searching for the best Pebble Beach caddie he could find.

The golfer’s name was Jack Nicklaus. He went on to win the tournament — and, of course, a few more. The caddie Nicklaus had been lined up with was one Dede Gonsalves — the same man who had looped for Johnston en route to the championship 32 years earlier.

Below, a photo of Gonsalves and Nicklaus in the 1961 U.S. Amateur, taken from the pages of Neil Hotelling’s book “Pebble Beach: The Official History.” (Original photo credit PBC-Graham/Brooks)

Foley Golf Club, est. 1930: Honesty counts (up)

Lost golf courses,

He was, one would think, one of the last people in the county who would either cheat or not fess up.

So it must be presumed that Father Frank First, then of St. Lawrence Catholic Church in Duelm, Minn., should be saluted for his forthrightness on a September day in 1930 just up the road from his home parish.

Father First, playing one of the first rounds on Foley Golf Club (Minnesota lost course No. 202), might have been briefly challenged by hellish temptation to not adhere to 6-6-d of the Rules of Golf, the bible of the game as it were, as spelled out by the United States Golf Association:

“The competitor is responsible for the correctness of the score recorded for each hole on his score card. If he returns a score for any hole lower than actually taken, he is disqualified.”

Golf is a game of honor. And Father First was being painfully honorable when he turned in his scorecard that day, as reported on by the Foley Independent of Sept. 24, 1930.

Ernest Boberg had low score of the day, posting an even 100, the newspaper reported, “while Father First of Duelm developed bad eyes and had high score, it being 120.”

Myopia isn’t a great excuse, Reverend, but yes, we’ve all experienced unmitigated disaster on the front nine. And the back. (Incidentally, Father First wreaked his gruesome revenge on golf 10 years later by, the St. Cloud Times reported, bowling a perfect game of 300 at the St. Anthony lanes in St. Cloud.)

Foley Golf Club was in the first days of its inaugural season when Father First brought his 20/250 up from Duelm. Going back five months, the Independent had reported on the club’s genesis.

“Foley Golf Fans to Have Course,” read the headline in the Foley Independent of April 23, 1930.

“Work has begun on the Foley Golf Course which is to be located on the Prudent Brunn farm, half a mile south of Foley,” the story began. “… Taking advantage of the natural features offered by the tract available is expected that a sporty and interesting course will be evolved. Some of the fairways will be over sloping hills and among fine shade trees, and a small pond will provide a splendid water hazard.

“… Mr. Brunn is contemplating, in addition to the golf course, the construction of a tennis court, which he plans to operate in connection.”

Brunn (his name was spelled Brun in references that carry more veracity) hired a prominent figure in Minnesota golf to design the course. Oscar Oman was the professional at Moorhead Country Club and, according to the Independent story, also had designed courses at Long Prairie, Paynesville, Browns Valley and Spicer (the latter two are now lost courses). An Internet entry indicates he also designed the current course at Ortonville.

Where was the Foley golf course situated? Only one source out of a half-dozen I talked with spoke with any conviction on the matter, and it confirmed what I had suspected.

An ad in the June 5, 1931, St. Cloud Times and credited to “Prudent Brun, Supt.” placed Foley Golf Course a half-mile south of town “on Duelm Road.” Though the modern-day Duelm Road runs east and west through Duelm, which is 6 1/2 miles south of Foley, it’s apparent that Brun’s reference was to what is now Minnesota Highway 25, which runs south out of Foley and to within a mile of Duelm.

A 1935 Benton County plat map shows an 80-acre plot near the Foley city limits and owned by Prudent Brun, with Stony Brook cutting through the far southeastern corner of the property. This is where Foley Golf Course was. Today, the southernmost holes of Stone Creek Golf Course lie just across Stony Brook from the old Brun property, and the resting place of Foley GC likely was be the area around Maria Drive, just southeast of the First Presbyterian Church.

The designs of Brun and Oman in the spring of 1930 appear to have not come to fruition until late summer. The St. Cloud Times of Sept. 1, 1930, reported that the Foley Commercial Club and Legion post had jointly donated $50 to pay “the professional golfer who last spring laid out the nine-hole course on the Brunn farm near here, for the members of the Foley Golf club.”

“Because of the weather the course has not been whipped into shape and the members of the club are waiting for a substantial rain before this work is to be done.”

The story listed par and yardage for each hole. No. 2 was the longest, at 530 yards. No. 8 was the shortest, at 200. Total yardage was 3,065, and par was 35. Greens fees were 25 cents. J.W. Nieman was the club president.

The course opened on Aug. 31, 1930, according to an account in the Foley Independent, with 18 golfers registered to play. Children were not allowed, and “ladies have been requested to leave their high heels home, due to the fact that these heels will spoil the greens.”

Brun, incidentally, barely won the race to establish the first golf course in Foley. The next week, the Independent reported on a new course in town, par 16, using Model T Ford parts. “Another hole is made of old worn out pistons,” the newspaper reported.

Yes, a miniature course.

On Sept. 28, 1930, Foley Golf Club held its first all-members tournament, with A.C. Kasner edging Boberg by one stroke.

An April 1931 story in the Independent confirmed that the Foley course had sand greens. “The course is very popular and is the coolest place under the sun,” an Aug. 5 story reported.

And within years of its founding, as with scores of golf courses across Minnesota, Foley GC’s star began to fade.

In May 1935, the St. Cloud Times reported that Tom Niedzielski, Benton County register of deeds, would keep Foley Golf Club operating.

“It appeared there would be no Foley golf course this year,” the story read. “Prudent Brun, owner of the farm on which the course is located, had decided that the financial returns did not warrant the bother of the course, and was going to plow the land on which the players were wont to test their skill. Came forward Brother Tom. He guaranteed the owner certain financial returns and will operate the course himself. A number of Foley businessmen, showing appreciation of Tom’s efforts, then decided to underwrite sufficient funds to cover the expense of operation.”

The move was a Band-Aid.  I found no evidence of further club activity in 1935 or ’36 and only one mention from 1937 in local newspapers.

“Golfers in Foley,” the St. Cloud Times reported in April 1937, “are confronted with the perennial decision of what to do with their golf course again this year. They have a nice nine-hole layout just south of town but they have been faced with the same financial problem that has bothered many other clubs in the state. Present reports are that the course is doomed this year unless something is done soon.”

As Father First might have put it, ashes to ashes …

1938 aerial photo of area just south of downtown Foley, to the south of Minnesota Highway 23. I believe Prudent Brun’s farm was in the top-left quarter of the photo, and his Foley Golf Club course likely was to the right (east) of his house. The course likely had been closed for a year or two when this photo was taken. Stony Brook runs through the bottom-center and right-center of the photo; to its right (east) is land on which part of Stone Creek Golf Course now lies. (University of Minnesota John Borchert Map Library photo.)

Note: This is the last of a series of posts on 13 lost golf courses in the St. Cloud area, nine of them established from the years 1928-32. The tightly packed combination of geographical area and years of founding make this one of the most remarkable phenomena I’ve seen in six years of researching Minnesota’s lost golf courses.

 

 

Milaca Golf Club, est. 1932: Replacement and forerunner

Lost golf courses, ,

After the Mille Lacs County Golf Club course in Foreston was abandoned — presumably so, and mysteriously so — as the de facto county seat of the game following the 1931 season, it took mere months for a replacement to emerge.

Less than four miles away, at that.

“Work to be Rushed on Milaca Golf Course,” read a headline in the Mille Lacs County Times of May 12, 1932, suggesting a degree of urgency on the part of the area’s golfers to get nine new fairways up and running and nine new cups down and, well, lying, I guess. The St. Cloud Daily Times followed four days later with a story that probably was a rewrite of the Mille Lacs paper entry, headlined “Milaca Begins Golf With 20 New Members.”

The St. Cloud story said an organization known as the Milaca Golf association would be formed if 20 people were to show up for a meeting that been held. Twenty-four did, and the organization was green-lighted.

Membership fee was set at $10, with greens fees to be determined.

“Land for the course has been procured north of Milaca on the west side of the Trunk Highway No. 18,” the St. Cloud Times reported, “and is well located, being rolling and sloping down gently to the bank of the Rum river. There are a number of large trees on the grounds that will help make it an ideal place for recreation.”

Stop right there.

Not with the construction of the course. I don’t mean that. The Milaca Golf Club course (lost course No. 201) was indeed built and endured for about a decade, to its credit during a tough time for golf in greater Minnesota. More on that to come. What I mean is, stop right there with detailing the course’s location.

Here is where the twisting, turning Rum River again — as with lost courses in Foreston and Princeton— grabbed me by, well, the knickers (metaphorically speaking; I don’t own any baggy pants) and threw me off course.

In searching for Milaca’s lost golf course, I looked for Highway 18. I looked for the Rum River. I found their nearest convergence closer to Foreston than Milaca: Mille Lacs County 18 crosses the West Branch of the Rum just north of Foreston, which is not “north of Milaca,” as reported in the newspaper story, and the river and highway come close to each other in only one other place, about three miles north of Foreston, a point that is decidedly more west of Milaca than north.

Old aerial photos offered no evidence of a golf course in this area. A phone call to Milaca’s current golf course, Stones Throw, turned up third-hand confirmation of a former course in Milaca but no hard evidence and no club members who recalled the place.

Plat maps were a long shot without knowing names of property owners on whose land the courses were placed. And all of the plat maps I could find left a large chronological gap, with maps from 1916 and 1954 but nothing in between.

On something of a lark, I discovered that the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library had a 1941 plat map of Milaca and the surrounding area.

And I found this:

Note the owner of a 40-acre plot near the top-center of the map: “Milaca Golf Ass’n.” And the plot is close to the Rum River, as mentioned in the St. Cloud Times story — albeit the East Branch of the Rum, not the West.

But where was Trunk Highway 18? Still over to the west, running north out of Foreston?

The answer is “Nope,” as it turns out. In the 1930s, Highway 18 ran north out of Milaca, not Foreston. The road later became Highway 169, as designated on this plat map. Today, it is named Central Avenue. Heading north out of downtown Milaca, Central Avenue runs past Stones Throw, out of the city and to a junction with U.S. 169.

A half-mile west of the junction lies the plot owned in 1941 by the Milaca Golf Association. It is now mostly a cornfield, says the current landowner, Milaca-area businessman Dale “Hoot” Gilbert, who confirmed that his land used to be a golf course. Though the 1941 plat map suggests the Rum touched the northwest corner of the Golf Association plot, Gilbert says his plot does not quite stretch to the river, coming within perhaps 300 yards of it.

And there we have it … positive ID of Milaca’s lost golf course.

The Milaca Golf Association course had not been opened by late May of 1932. A Mille Lacs County Times story noted that the new course would have sand greens — one square, one octagonal and seven round. Four men, under the direction of Walter Bowman, were building the course.

The layout had been designed by a prominent figure in St. Cloud-area golf. Larry Rieder was a golf and football standout at St. Cloud Teachers College before becoming golf coach at the college and professional (and trick-shot artist) at St. Cloud Country Club. He was enlisted by Milaca businessmen to “lay out a new municipal golf course along the banks of the Rum river,” the St. Cloud Times reported on May 24, 1932, “and the proposed project of the new Milaca Golf club is nearing completion.”

Dr. M.K. Rudd struck the first tee shot at the new course at 8 a.m. on June 26, 1932. Weekday greens fees were set at 25 cents. Sixty players tried the course on its opening day, Olen Olson of Milaca heading the field with a 40-43–83.

“A large number of those playing,” the Mille Lacs County Times reported, “did not turn in their score cards to to having trouble on the treacherous six and eight holes of the course. These two holes, although considered no harder than the rest of the seven are giving the players more trouble due to the fact that these two holes call for unusual control of the iron clubs.”

Translation: I don’t care what you say. Those two holes must have been damn difficult.

Play at Milaca Golf Club continued for more than a decade, though apparently not uninterrupted. Al Sundberg of Milaca won a 14-person competition in July 1937 with an 82 in high winds. R.B. Hixson was club president through the late 1930s and as late as 1942.

Best guess here is that Milaca Golf Club ceased operations in 1943. On April 29, 1944, the St. Cloud Times reported that a meeting would be held and “open to anyone interested in playing golf after the war, inasmuch as it is planned to operate the course as soon as the war is over.”

On May 23, 1944, the Milaca Chamber of Commerce endorsed a plan for the golf club to operate after World War II ended. “The businessmen agreed that the golf club was a decided asset to the village and might be instrumental in inducing other businesses and professional men to locate here …” the Mille Lacs County Times reported.

More than $200 had been raised to keep the club operating, but $600 more would be required “so that when the war is won and the boys return, they will know that the home front has done its part to preserve the things they left behind.”

However, I found no mentions of Milaca Golf Club in brief scans of 1947 and 1949 newspapers. It wasn’t until 1955 that the city became host to a golf course again.

This course again was named Milaca Golf Club, again featured sand greens and was designed by Elinor Johnson. Some of the new club’s founders, according to current club manager Wendy Hoeck, had been officers when the first Milaca GC was organized in 1932. Among them were Edwin Odegard, A.R. Cravens, J.A. Allen, E.S. Hagquist and Henry Anderson.

The club added nine holes in 2000, designed by Jeff McDowell. Now named Stones Throw Golf Course, its sixth and seventh holes nestle up against the Rum River, and O’Neill Brook cuts through the property and comes into play on other holes.

Not so shockingly, Larry Rieder’s square and octagonal greens are nowhere to be found.

Below, a few images from Stones Throw. The Rum was up from rainfall on the day I visited. The video is very short, but hey — songbirds.

 

Thank you to the Mille Lacs Historical Society, especially Wendy Davis, for the research help.

 

Minnesota’s lost golf courses: Picture show

Two hundred lost golf courses later, I’m tired of writing.

For a day or two.

Having identified 12.66666666666667 dozen lost golf courses in Minnesota (I did the math on my computer’s calculator and copied the answer), no more purple prose for now. Just some of my favorite photographs. Limit one photo per lost course. And please, if for some reason you feel inclined to share any of these, feel free, but credit the source on the photo, if there is one.

Hover over the image with your mouse to see caption, and apologies for the rudimentary web display.

Also, in the event you might like to take a look at my updated Google map with all 200 lost courses, click here.