Category Archives: Golf history

Tree trouble and townball: Naeseth Country Club, Wanamingo

Golf history, Lost golf courses, , ,

There are three “schools” of golf course design: strategic, heroic and penal. Let’s skip the first two. Why? Because.

Penal design, to paraphrase the website Fried Egg Golf, means there’s a lot of stuff that can get in the way of your ball. Fried Egg defines penal design this way: “There is a right way to play a hole. Hit the required shots, which are typically straight down the middle, and get rewarded. Errant shots are punished proportionate to the degree of err.”

Visitors to Adolph Naeseth’s golf course discovered that the hard way.

Naeseth (pronounced Nesseth) established a tree-lined golf course in 1925 on his farm in Wanamingo Township, Goodhue County, about 25 miles northwest of Rochester. Michelle Knutson, member of a prominent golfing family in nearby Zumbrota, in 2007 posted to Ancestry.com a recollection titled “A little history of golf in Zumbrota.” Nearby Naeseth Country Club was included.

“He made his own course,” Knutson wrote of Naeseth. “It was a piece of land that had been used for pasture. There were many trees between holes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Holes 1, 8 and 9 were open.”

1938 aerial view of presumed grounds of Naeseth Country Club. The course, which lay halfway between the tiny towns of Hader and Aspelund, likely had shut down a few years earlier. The diagonal highway is Goodhue County 8, and 97th Avenue borders the course on the west. Hole routings are easy to envision among the open areas, and a handful of sand greens – small, round, white circles – are visible. Photo via University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library.
Photo at top of post: Adolph Naeseth, left. Courtesy of Gary Bakko.

In May 1926, golfers from Zumbrota, Lake City Golf Club and Naeseth CC met in Lake City for a competition. The hosts won, the Wanamingo Progress reported (no score was mentioned). Two months later, the Lake City club visited Naeseth’s property and, apparently not ready for penal prime time, played pinball among the hardwoods and was drubbed this time, 36-11 by the Naeseth club. Only six Lake City players out of 17 broke 100 over 18 holes. Naeseth shot the day’s low score, an 86.

The Progress declared the heavily wooded Naeseth course a “mental hazard” for the Lake City group and said it “proved a heavy handicap.” Months earlier, the Progress had called Naeseth CC “a tricky course to play.”

That September, Naeseth won his club championship, defeating someone the Progress identified only as “Dr. Knutson” (presumably Dr. Alfred Knutson of Zumbrota, member of the aforementioned golfing family) with a “record game” of 77-77–154. The Progress congratulated Naeseth for his skill “at the close of his third year of play.”

Well done, for sure, especially for a relative beginner. But it was by far not not the first time Naeseth had starred in an athletic endeavor.

In basketball, Naeseth was a standout at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He still shares the Luther school record for most field goals in a game, with 16 in 1907.

And in baseball, his achievements were legendary.

At Luther, Naeseth built pitching credentials that would land him in the school’s athletic hall of fame. In eight games against major college competition, according to his hall of fame profile, he won four times, lost twice and tied twice. Victories came over Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nebraska (twice). He struck out 21 batters in one 15-inning game and, as a senior, struck out three batters in the ninth inning with the bases loaded and no outs to secure a 1-0 victory over Wisconsin.

After graduation, Naeseth returned home to the family farm — his father, Ole K. Naeseth, had been a Minnesota state senator and representative — and played town baseball. One account lists him as having been signed by the St. Paul Saints but having his professional career cut short by an arm injury. An October 1922 entry in the Minneapolis Star noted Naeseth, pitching for Zumbrota, throwing a 12-inning no-hitter with 17 strikeouts and no walks in a game against Lake City.

“Naeseth has been offered a contract with the Chicago White Sox, but his parents have objected,” the Star reported.

In June 1934, Naeseth returned to the pitcher’s mound for the first time in more than a decade and, according to the Progress, “demonstrated that he has lost none of his cunning and little, if any of the control which elevated him to rank among semi-professional pitchers in a glorious and never-to-be-forgotten past.” Translation: He was an ace again. He had just pitched a five-hitter with 18 strikeouts in a Wanamingo victory. That August, in Wanamingo’s 14-9 victory over Hammond to clinch the River Valley League championship, Naeseth struck out 15 batters, running his strikeout total to 126 in 11 games.

He was 48 years old.

At his golf course, play continued into the 1930s, and not much longer. By 1927, Naeseth Country Club had taken on a new identity as Wanamingo Country Club. Newspaper stories mentioning the golf course became more scarce — the last one I could find was a July 1933 Redwood Falls Chronicle tale about a Minneapolis golfer losing his ball in a tree on the fourth hole, then on his second nine pumping another shot into the same tree, dislodging both balls.

Teeing off at Naeseth Country Club, 1928. Wanamingo resident Gary Bakko
says this is the only known photo of the course.

Gary Bakko, who lives in Wanamingo and has chronicled some of the history of the city and area, was acquainted as a child with Naeseth. The Great Depression, Bakko presumed in a telephone interview, was the “death knell” for Wanamingo Country Club.

Adolph Naeseth died in 1965.

Notes

  • Naeseth’s daughter, Barbara, was listed as “golf champion of Goodhue County, 1931” in a 1956 family history written by Gerhard Brandt Naeseth, a well-known librarian and geneaologist and for whom a geneaological center and library at the University of Wisconsin is named.
  • In August 1926, the golfers of Naeseth Country Club traveled to Lakeville for a match against another club that is now long gone and largely unremembered. The Naeseth club lost by one stroke to Antlers Park. Naeseth was the medalist with an 81 and won three golf balls, according to the Wanamingo Progress.
  • The first president of Naeseth CC was H.E. Hanson of Zumbrota, elected in April 1925. Naeseth headed the rules and regulations committee and greens committee.
  • Naeseth CC is lost course No. 249 on my list of documented lost golf courses in Minnesota. Any numbering represents basically only the order in which I came upon the courses. No. 250 and more are surely out there. Drop me a note and tell me about another. Cheers. To view the lost-course map, go here: Minnesota lost course map

Lost courses, or just my imagination?

Golf history, Lost golf courses,

Ben Hogan, asked about his indefatigable search to hone the perfect golf swing, famously replied, “I dug it out of the dirt.”

Props to you, Ben. We can dig it, though certainly not to your level (four U.S. Opens, two PGAs, two Masters, one British Open). Matter of fact, for most of us pedestrian double-digit sloggers, the concept of digging it out of the dirt generally has to do with stubbing an L-wedge two inches behind the intended point of impact and propelling the ball four feet forward.

Carrying the concept over to Minnesota’s lost golf courses, digging also produces mixed results. For instance, I searched, often exhaustively, over years even, and still sometimes came up with no answers to this existential question: Was there a golf course there or not?

With 233 Minnesota lost courses now identified, I’m turning to a group of maybes. That is, maybe there was a golf course there, maybe there wasn’t. In many cases, I’d bet there was, but I could just never confirm it.

I know there are people who know about some of these places. I’d love to be hear from them.

Digging in:

St. Louis Park: It’s been close to 10 years since an e-mailer wrote that a relative had told her of a golf course owned by Jean Pierre Butte (aka John Peter Hill, she wrote) on land “approximately located in St. Louis Park between Brunswick Avenue South to the west, Cedar Lake Road to the south, 16th Street West to the north, and beyond Zarthan Avenue South to the east.” The e-mailer offered no other details.

A decade later, I remain puzzled.

I believe that land would now be in the vicinity of Park Place Plaza, where there is a Home Depot and a Costco, or possibly a block or three west of that. I searched newspaper archives and a smattering of old St. Louis Park and Minneapolis city directories and came up with no evidence of such a course.

The aerial photo below shows this area in 1937. After that date and to the present, there is much more residential and apparently commercial development. The road at the top is what is now I-394; the road at the bottom that crests to the north is Cedar Lake Road. When I look for lost golf courses in aerial maps, there are two telltale signs: clear patterns of fairways, and small white dots that indicate sand greens. I see a couple of such dots in this photo — not the  larger, horizontal ovals near the top — but I doubt they were golf-course greens.

From University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library

Big Lake: From a note copied from a newspaper issue of July 31, 1924 — I failed to mark the exact source but I suspect it was the Sherburne County Star News — I have this:

“Engineer FW Nickerson this week has completed a plat of the Thomas farm on the west shore of Lake Mitchell at Big Lake. … The plat includes some nice lake shore lots and a proposed golf course back from the lake. The course will extend back across the Elk River, which should make it more attractive.”

An aerial photo from 1938 shows no signs of a golf course.

Duluth: A couple of years ago, a man in the east Metro told me about a course that used to be where the Miller Hill Mall is now. I spent almost 16 years in Duluth one winter’s day no that’s a joke starting in 1981 and never heard of such a place, but the man lived in Duluth, knew his golf, and I bet he was right. (I’m almost certain he wasn’t referring to the lost Maple Grove Golf Acres course just up the road in Hermantown.)

Hollandale: A story in the Albert Lea Tribune of May 2, 1931, which went into detail about the establishment of the long-lost Recreation Course in that city (“Albert Lea, Part II: A little recreation, a little history”) also mentioned plans for a course to be built that summer at Hollandale, 11 miles to the northeast of Albert Lea. No other details were offered, and I never found evidence the course was built.

Lake Wilson: Also stumbled across a reference to this Murray County city and an impending establishment of a golf course in the April 27, 1930, Minneapolis Star Tribune:

“Dr. Stanley S. Chunn has been elected president of the newly organized Lake Wilson Golf club, and G. A. Swenson will serve as the first secretary. A number of sites for the course are under consideration and selection will be made soon.”

That sent me to archives of the Lake Wilson Pilot. Seventeen days earlier, the Pilot reported that an organizational meeting for a golf and possibly tennis club would be held. And on April 17, a Pilot story was headlined, “Lake Wilson Again Will Have Golf Links.” (The “Again” in the headline is intriguing — did Lake Wilson have a course before 1930?)

The latter story said a $5 membership fee had been established, and that “a number of sites” were being considered for the golf course. But I never found evidence that a course ever was built.

Janesville: As it relates to the headline in this post, Janesville apparently falls under “just my imagination.”

A July 3, 1927, story about a tournament for the Southern Minnesota Golf Association mentioned this city as a member club. Janesville was not listed as an association member in stories I found from 1926 and 1932. The city’s current course, Prairie Ridge, is near the northwestern corner of town, and was established in 1995, according to Internet entries.

An aerial photo from 1938 shows land just to the west east of the city limits and I believe bordering what is now Old Highway 14 to the south, with patterns that conspicuously look like hole routings on a golf course. See below, courtesy of the Borchert Map Library.

These patterns had blended into the surrounding area in aerials from 1951, suggesting the course had closed by then.

Someone in Janesville surely knows about this. I don’t know anyone in Janesville. But the Waseca County Historical Society was kind enough to have searched newspaper archives and talked to a few of the locals, and nobody knew about a Janesville course predating Prairie Ridge.

So, no lost golf course at Janesville. Somebody prove me wrong. Please.

Battle Lake: I thought I had a bead on this area seven or eight years ago. Now the bead has been turned into a blob — a faded blob in my memory banks.

Someone told me of cross country ski trails that wound through part of Glendalough State Park, just northwest of Battle Lake. I looked at historic aerial photos and at one time thought I spotted a surefire golf course routing, maybe on the south shore of Lake Blanche, but now I’m not finding it.

Also, the Minneapolis Tribune ran a classified ad on June 3, 1973, advertising a “proposed golf course” at a Chippewa Island resort on East Battle Lake. Have to say I’m clueless on that as well.

Update, 2024: A Glendalough Park employee has told me that previous owners of the land plotted two or three holes onto the site. Hence, not a lost golf course. Got to have at least five holes for me to consider it a golf course.

Dawson: The Dawson Golf Club website and other Internet entries place 1928 as the year the course was established in the small Lac qui Parle County city. I know of two newspaper references to Dawson Golf Club having played in competitions against other clubs in the area, in 1922 and ’23. Perhaps a lost course in town before the current one came along? I have no idea, but it wouldn’t be even remotely unheard of.

Montevideo: Two golf courses in this western Minnesota city at one point? I’m not sure. GolfLink, a website that posts generally reliable info on courses’ years of establishment, says River Crest in Montevideo (formerly The Crossings, presumably a different name even before that) was established in 1923. Got it so far. The plot thickens, though, when I see a Minneapolis Star story from June 14, 1932, that mentions a Minnesota Valley Golf Association tournament to be played at Montevideo Golf club. Among clubs participating would be “… Monte-Sota Golf club of Montevideo and the Montevideo Golf club.”

In May 1930, a Minneapolis Sunday Tribune story mentioned the same two golf clubs — same city, different clubs. And a Monte-Sota Golf Club of Montevideo was incorporated on May 10, 1930, according to papers presumably held by the Minnesota Secretary of State.

I see only four Monte-Sota references, none dating past 1934.

I can’t account for what to me looks like two golf clubs (albeit maybe not courses) in the same city.

Belle Plaine: “Tri-City Golf Club Planned,” read a small headline on a one-paragraph story in the Tribune of March 31, 1929. “Plans are under way here for the organization of the Tri-City Golf club, membership of which will be drawn from Belle Plaine, Jordan and New Prague,” read the item.

I poked around aerial photos of the Belle Plaine area from the 1930s and saw no golf course.

Clearbrook: I never found confirmation of a golf course in this city 30 miles northwest of Bemidji, but I found newspaper clips from 1930 and 1933 saying a Clearbrook club would play at a Red River tournament at Crookston, and mentions of Wayne Randall and Hardine Anderson of Clearbrook playing in area tournaments.

There are at least a dozen other places not mentioned here in which I found hints of courses abandoned or planned that aren’t listed on my map or mentioned in my writings. Off the top, I can think of Adrian, Aitkin (15 miles west of town, an old golf guide said) and Gilbert (not the Eveleth or Eshquaguma courses, as far as I could tell). At this point, I’m just about prepared to leave it at that, unless someone reading this or other postings can (please?) tell me more.

Cheers.

Building toward 240: Lake Harriet, Lake Pepin again

Golf history, Lost golf courses

The addition of I’m-saying-it-was-a-golf-course-Weequah Country Club last week takes us up to 232 known lost golf courses in Minnesota (see map, but don’t forget to come back here). Where will it end?

It won’t.

As sure as there are more than a thousand islands in the Thousand Islands (there are more than 1,800, Wikipedia says), there are more than 232 lost golf courses in Minnesota. I’d say 250 for sure, maybe close to 300. Maybe more.

The hard-core side of my search for lost courses in Minnesota has closed, with 232 layouts such as Roadside and Red Lake Falls and Rush City in tow. After a decade of tracking, I have backed way off.  But I’ll be glad to identify, maybe even write about, any more that turn up.

In the meantime, there are contenders and pretenders that I’m for now leaving by the side of the road (Roadside, get it?). Some are for-sure lost courses that I just don’t know enough about to add to the list, and some may be just products of imagination.

Here are a couple. Opinions and evidence always welcome:

Lake Harriet Golf Club

An entry in the Harper’s Official Golf Guide of 1901, under the Minnesota section, reads:

“LAKE HARRIET GOLF CLUB — Organized, September, 1900. A nine-hole course. Principal members, Frank L. Schoonmaker, Judge Andreas Deland, A.S. Keyes, J.H. Eschman, Hector Baxter, John Larrimore, and Mayor Gray.”

The 1902 Harper’s Guide also listed the Lake Harriet club, though detailing only the founding date and number of holes.

The only other reference I could find to this club came in 1904, with a Sept. 11 Minneapolis Tribune story noting an undelivered package addressed to “Secty. Lake Harriet Golf Club” being held by the Minneapolis post office, with instructions for claiming. As tempting as it is to zip over there and try to claim contents of the package — a shiny new brassie, perhaps? — the story also advised that “If not called for in two weeks letters are sent to the  dead letter office, Washington D.C.” And it just seems too much of a hassle to run over to the D.C. office and look for a package that might not be there 117 1/2 years later.

Regardless, it’s clear there was a golf club based in the Lake Harriet area, in the southwestern portion of Minneapolis. Whether there was a golf course associated with the club, though the golf guide entries strongly suggests it, I don’t know — and I have spent hours trying to figure it out.

Among the principals mentioned above, from what I can briefly gather,  Schoonmaker was a Minneapolis city councilor, Eschman a Lake Harriet concessionaire, Baxter a railroad president and a member of the Linden Hills Improvement Association, and “Mayor Gray” was James Gray, 18th mayor of Minneapolis, elected 1898. I could not find any other particular connections to golf among these men.

Incidentally, other Minnesota golf courses/clubs listed in the 1901 guide — named and spelled as they were in the guide — were Albert Lea (“we understand a golf club is about to be organized here”), Camden Place (this was the Camden Park Golf Club in north Minneapolis), Northland Golf Club of Duluth, an unknown course in Duluth “located west of the Mesaba Railroad, between Superior and West Third streets,” Faribault Golf Club (also known as Tatepaha), Bryn Mawr Golf Club of Minneapolis, Lafayette Club of Minnetonka Beach, Minikahda Golf Club of Minneapolis, St. Cloud Golf Club (not the same as St. Cloud Country Club), Merriam Park Golf Club of St. Paul, Roadside Golf Club of St. Paul and Town And Country Club of St. Paul, and Meadow Brook Golf Club of Winona.

Lake Pepin Country Club

I am adding this place to my list, calling it lost course No. 233, after flopping around like a boated Mississippi River smallmouth regarding this site and after brooking no small personal embarrassment.

After hearing in 2016 about a place called Lake Pepin Country Club, I declared to some that it was a lost golf course — only to spout a smart-mouthed rebuttal months later. That rebuttal is at this link, at once smarmy and enlightening as to the club’s foundations and, in the end, as misguided as a JFK Junior reincarnation party on a Dallas street.

I’ll not go into great detail about Lake Pepin CC, which lay two miles northwest of downtown Lake City, near the current site of Hok-Si-La Municipal Park and Campground. Click on the link above to learn more. But the Lake Pepin CC pamphlet that is posted there, which suggests a golf course would be built on site after the club’s founding in 1910, plus a Winona Republican-Herald story from Oct. 4, 1910, that suggested the same — “golf links through the shaded woods,” with a clubhouse to be built in 1911 — offered hints of a layout in the making.

“Hints” and “in the making,” however, do not constitute certain evidence of a lost golf course. But this does, if you ask me:

“Entertained at Red Wing,” read the title of a one-paragraph entry in the Winona Daily Republican-Herald of May 29, 1911, followed by the big reveal:

“The Moline houseboat party which was in Winona last week was entertained at the golf links at the Lake Pepin Country club on Friday on the way down the river.”

That’s the entirety of the entry, which I stumbled upon just today, but it clearly establishes Lake Pepin CC as a lost golf course. My smart-alecky November 2016 self has been duly upbraided, trust me. And another entry has been added to my list and map. That makes 233 lost courses.

For what it’s worth, 1913 was the final year of operation for Lake Pepin Country Club.

Photo at top of post: Early autumn, looking south down Lake Pepin and the Mississippi River from the Hok-Si-La Campground north of Lake City. The Lake Pepin Country Club (though not necessarily its golf course) presumably was situated on or near this spot.

Next post: More maybe-yes, maybe-no lost courses.

Looking south, toward Lake City and the lower Lake Pepin, from the Hok-Si-La beach.

From a trail on the north side of Hok-Si-La (note very small dork at far right searching for an old fairway he’ll never find). Katie Bissen Zaffke photo – also the flower below.

Weequah, St. Paul: Golf, or just boats and such?

Golf history, Lost golf courses, ,

During a decade of searching for lost golf courses, I’ve found a few. Well, it isn’t fair to say I found them, because, as anonymous as they might be 100 years later, they were of course known about by someone, somewhere, sometime. And I just pieced together spare parts for the purpose of telling a story.

The best example I can think of is Silver Creek in Rochester, a century-old lost course that as far as I can figure was known to only a handful of Minnesotans before it was uncovered to some degree in a March 2017 post on this site. It was a historically important course, to boot.

But as an unknown or virtually unknown place, Silver Creek is just the tip of a lost-course iceberg.

As of the moment I’m writing this, there are 231 entries on my list-slash-map of Minnesota’s lost golf courses, viewable here. I’d guess there are 50 to a hundred more that I don’t know about. Maybe more.

Then there are places I know about, but I don’t know for sure whether an organized golf course ever existed there.

Weequah, for instance.

Golf near the shores of Lake Phalen in St. Paul predates 1925. Phalen Golf Course was the city’s first public course, established in 1917 near the lake’s western shore. Judging by aerial photographs and one close-up (below), the current verdant and tree-lined Phalen GC doesn’t look a lot different than it did in its early years, save for the sand greens.

Phalen Golf Course postcard photo, likely dating to the 1920s or early ’30s.

Less than a mile east of Phalen GC, across the neck of of Lake Phalen, lay home base for the Weequah Canoe Club.

“At 1492 East Shore Drive is the clubhouse of the Weequah Canoe Club, built in 1924 by Swedish businessmen,” wrote Donald Empson in his book “The Street Where You Live: A Guide to the Place Names of St. Paul.”

Empson continued: “A few years later, after establishing a golf course, it became the Weequah Country Club; today it is a private residence.”

A golf course on the east side of Lake Phalen? Never heard of such a thing. Nor had the handful of people I talked to about it.  Nor could I find a reference to golf at Weequah in online searches of newspaper archives, nor in a one-hour search (that’s certainly not expansive) of St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch archives from the mid-1920s. (I would have looked harder, but those newspapers are archived at the Minnesota History Center, which because of the pandemic I visited that one and only time in 2021, and I have no plans to return soon. Also, note updates at the bottom of this post.)

The Weequah Canoe Club dates to 1913 or before, that date being the earliest reference I could find online. The club participated in rowing events on Lake Phalen and beyond. As for whether golf  was ever played onsite, understandable skepticism was offered last year by the man who lives at the St. Paul address of the former Weequah Canoe Club and who owns background knowledge.

The Weequah club “had a locker room, Bar & Grill, Pool Table, and a large dance floor that led out onto the veranda port hall,” wrote William Zajicek in an online message. “They also had a tennis court and a golf club but to the best of our knowledge used the golf course across the lake in Phalen Park.”

That’s a perfectly logical supposition, though it pits Zajicek’s understanding (no golf course on the Weequah grounds) against Empson’s (yep and fore!).

Zajicek suggested in a subsequent message that he suspected the area surrounding Weequah at that time was not topographically fit for a golf course.

“The Weequah,” Zajicek wrote, “is built on a sand ridge that runs parallel to the lake shore starting at Arlington (Avenue) and going to the north toward a larger plateau. You can see the creek/drainage area behind the Weequah which led to the lake. The area to the east, I was told, required a good deal of fill before it could be developed in the ’50s.”

I’m not going to profess to know more about the surroundings than Zajicek. No way. But I’ll assert that a lot of golf courses, from living to long-expired, have been built on land not well-suited for golf. Notably among Minnesota lost courses,, there was the old Memorial Field course in Mankato, which briefly operated in a veritable swamp in the late 1930s.

Back to Weequah … aerial photographs also make me wonder.

From John Borchert Map Library digital files, University of Minnesota

The photo above shows Lake Phalen and the area to the east in 1923. The Weequah club, if I understand correctly, was along the road on the eastern shore — I believe near the bright-white spot where the road turned from directly north-and-southbound to a more diagonal angle. The suggestion is that the immediately surrounding land, including the creek that can be seen in the photo, was low-lying and not conducive to golf. That likely is true. But north of that, and east of the creek (in the right-center area of the photo), lies an area dotted with trees. It wouldn’t have been exactly out the backdoor of the Weequah Club but would have been only a few hundred steps from it. I swear it’s not outlandish to visualize tree lines between which golf fairways could have lain. I ran this theory past someone familiar with the look of old golf courses in historic aerial photos, and he didn’t see it as I did. But I haven’t wavered. I’m also thinking this spot of lightly wooded land was on higher ground than what’s to its southwest, and would have been about the right size for five to nine golf holes.

For purposes of modern-day context, I’m suggesting this this “golf-able” land would have been just west of the thin, light vertical line on the aerial photo, which I believe is now the Bruce Vento Regional Trail and originally was the St. Paul and Duluth Railroad. English Street runs nearby and close to parallel. Today, this is a residential area, near Hoyt and Idaho avenues and Chamber Street.

I know little else about Weequah, whether as canoe club, country club (i.e. with golf course) or just plain club-club. A 1922 Minneapolis Star story reported there were about 220 members. The latest reference I could find to it being an existing club came in 1940. A 1924 entry in “Minnesota and Its People” listed St. Paul dentist Daniel O. Ostergren as a Weequah Club member, “fond of fishing, motoring and playing golf.”

As with other places I’ve heard about over the years, I’ve left it up to — well, me, a committee of one — to decide whether a place in question is a lost golf course or just a slice of fiction. (If I’m the only one who cares, be that as it may.) So I have to render my own verdict, and I’ll do that with Weequah:

I’m saying, on admittedly thin evidence, there once was an organized golf grounds at Weequah. And I’m calling it a lost golf course — No. 232 on the list.

As always, feel free to enlighten or correct me if you have knowledge, or just want to speculate, or just want to call me a crackpot. I can take it.

Next: a few other venues I’m not sure about. I had planned to include them here, but I grossly exceeded my entirely mythical word-count limit.

Update, Jan. 29, 2022: I have received two items that shed light on Weequah, though they don’t solve the mystery of whether there was a course on the grounds.

The first is a display of Weequah golf champions, passed along by the aforementioned William Zajicek. To my surprise, it covers the years 1921 to 1937, a much longer period of time than I suspected the golf club existed, and now it suggests to me that there might not  have been a course on the site, if it lasted that long while the surrounding area began to see more residential development.

Courtesy of William Zajicek

Below is an aerial photo of the area in 1940, again from the Borchert Library website. Yes, residential development had begun, notably along English Street, but the area remained mostly devoid of buildings.

The other item is an entry in “Tee Party on the Green,” a 1925 publication that covered goings-on in Minnesota golf. On the “Twin Cities Miscellany” page, an entry mentioned that “Karl Karlson led the qualifiers in the Weequah Country club’s annual championship golf tournament with a net score of 140 for the 36 holes.” Interestingly, other Miscellany entries mention tournaments played by civic organizations or groups, but those always mentioned at which course the event was played. The Weequah entry included no such caveat, such as “played at the Phalen links,” thus suggesting Weequah had a layout of its own.

In any event, Weequah remains largely a mystery to me.

Tom Bendelow: Appleseeds sprinkled about Minnesota

Golf history

The early evolution of Minnesota golf, starting in the mid-1890s and continuing through the next four decades, is owed to more than a half-dozen groups: players, investors, instructors, city planners, club professionals, greenskeepers and even curiosity seekers.

And one more, as important as any other: golf course architects.

Minnesota was fortunate to have had skilled architects walk its land in those days, some as residents of the state (albeit transplants) and some as for-hire creators within state borders. By my estimation, nine such men were especially influential. More or less in chronological order: Robert Foulis, William Watson, William Clark, Tom Vardon, Donald Ross, Ben Knight, Seth Raynor and A.W. Tillinghast.

Wait, that’s only eight. The ninth?

Tom Bendelow. One of nine, yet one of a kind.

Bendelow’s body of work can be reasonably summarized in two words: One, copious, and two, underappreciated.

Bendelow was credited with laying out close to 700 golf courses, according to a flier forwarded to me by Bendelow historian Stuart Bendelow, who is Tom Bendelow’s grandson. That makes him the most prolific golf architect of all time worldwide, probably by a significant margin.

Stuart Bendelow’s research resulted in his appropriately titled book “Thomas ‘Tom’ Bendelow, The Johnny Appleseed of American Golf,” published in 2006. It is a thorough, well-written biography that describes not only the architect but the golf environment of the late 1800s and early 1900s in which he worked.

In prior decades, some of Bendelow’s designs were brushed off as “eighteen stakes on a Sunday afternoon.” (Never mind, wrote Geoff Cornish and Ron Whitten in “Architects of Golf,” that Bendelow was deeply religious and never worked or played golf on Sundays, never drank alcohol, never swore and never told off-color jokes.) That criticism is heard less these days, both with the writing of Stuart Bendelow’s book and with the recognition that designing 700 golf courses, whether they be enduring classics or “sporty” nine-holers – that was said to be Tom Bendelow’s favorite one-word course description – was no walk after walk after walk in the park.

Much of Bendelow’s work came with him employed by the A.G. Spalding Co. of Chicago. “When Bendelow joined A.G. Spalding & Bros.” Stuart Bendelow wrote, “his (and A.G.’s) objective was to promote the game of golf … by increasing the number of golf courses. They were not seeking to design and build championship courses or courses to test the honed skills of the best players, but rather courses that new players could enjoy, courses that would improve player proficiency, courses that would promote player participation, and courses that could be maintained at a reasonable expense. Ideally, he felt that municipal or public golf courses should be like public ball fields, open to all players at little or no cost. …

“It would be fair,” Stuart Bendelow continued later, “to call Bendelow’s approach to course design a ‘naturalist’s approach,’ in that he strove to utilize the natural features of the course to maximum advantage.”

Tom Bendelow’s most noted work was Medinah No. 3 in suburban Chicago (1928). He designed 118 courses in Illinois, according to a list assembled by Stuart Bendelow, and branched out in all directions, including north to Wisconsin for 39 and northwest to Minnesota for somewhere between eight and 12.

The Bendelow-designed Minnesota courses on Stuart Bendelow’s list raise questions about some details, including course names and contributions to particular projects, i.e. was he a sole designer? Collaborator? Redesigner? Overseer of an expansion? Contributor? That isn’t intended as a diminishing of Stuart Bendelow’s book, which includes many such notations and meticulously documented sources. The issue, rather, is that assembling source material on century-old golf courses can be incomplete, inaccurate or hopelessly labyrinthine. (That’s speaking from experience.)

In any event, these are the Minnesota golf courses cited by Stuart Bendelow as Tom Bendelow designs: Northland Country Club, Duluth, 1912; Edina CC, 1915; Lafayette Club, 1915; Minneapolis Golf Club, 1916; Minnetonka Country Club, 1916; Golden Valley CC, 1916; Detroit Country Club, Detroit Lakes, 1917; CC of Minneapolis, 1919; Mankato Golf Club, 1921.

Just to add or elaborate, based on other accounts:

— Tom Bendelow likely advised on Northland’s expansion to 18 holes.

— The Minneapolis GC and Golden Valley CC references likely refer to the same course. The grounds in Golden Valley were originally named Minneapolis Golf Club; most of that club’s membership moved to St. Louis Park in 1916, and Bendelow then laid out a nine-holer (1916) and then 18-holer (1918) in Golden Valley, later overhauled by A.W. Tillinghast.

— I’m uncertain about the reference to CC of Minneapolis, which Stuart Bendelow attributes to “Golf Courses by the American Park Builders” in 1926. It might have been to Minikahda, where earlier Tom Bendelow oversaw improvements to an expansion of that course to 18 holes, according to Minnesota golf historian Rick Shefchik’s book “From Fields to Fairways.”

— Bendelow also designed or contributed to the design of Winona Country Club (now called Bridges, established in 1920), Alexandria Country Club and Interlaken in Fairmont. Some accounts credit Winona CC solely to Knight, but I suspect Bendelow was at least as vital to the original design as Knight, the first professional at Winona CC. (Watson also is credited in some accounts.)

Bendelow’s most prominent design in Minnesota was Minnetonka Country Club, a course I covered at some length in my book “More! Gone. Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses, Part 2,” released in July. Though I can’t say I ever played the course, which closed permanently in 2014, I gather from a handful who have played it that its design and features largely reflected what was written earlier here about Bendelow.

Design map of Minnetonka Country Club at its inception in 1916. Courtesy of former Minnetonka CC pro Bob Olds.

“The cultivation and expansion of the rudimentary layouts he planned was up to the club he was visiting,” the late Bob Labbance, a member of the U.S. Golf Association museum and library committee, once wrote. “If they installed hazards, developed greens and expended the length of the course as playing talent improved, his work would live on for decades. If not, at least they had a foundation to appreciate the game.”

I had a pleasant conversation with Stuart Bendelow early this year regarding his grandfather’s work at Minnetonka and other Minnesota sites. A couple of months ago, he forwarded documents with more information on his famed grandfather. Among the highlights:

— Tom Bendelow, born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1868, grew up playing the Aberdeen Kings Links and was a typesetter before moving to America in 1892.

— He redesigned Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and was its first superintendent.

— He opened America’s first indoor golf school in New York City in 1895-96.

— He “laid out 150 golf courses in the past eighteen months,” the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News reported. By 1915, that number had increased to 500.

— He lectured on golf course design and construction at the University of Illinois, prompting the university to include golf course design into its landscape architecture curriculum, the first in the United States.

Bendelow’s other design credits and accomplishments as a U.S. golf pioneer are ample. Wrote Stuart Bendelow: “Tom Bendelow’s efforts were preeminent in the founding and growth of golf as a popular sport among the greater population in America.”