Category Archives: Lost golf courses

St. Cloud and neighbors V: On campus, at the fair

Lost golf courses, , ,

Almost equidistant from Minnesota Highway 23, our asphalt reference point of note for St. Cloud-area lost golf courses, lie two more abandoned layouts, both on sites that you wouldn’t think of as terrific golf-course sites any more than you might think of the Everglades as a terrific site for a NASCAR track.

A college campus, and a fairgrounds. Different cities. Different sides of the highway. Similarly unusual venues.

St. Cloud Teachers College course (lost course No. 196)

The St. Cloud Teachers College golf course began with an elevated first tee atop the steps to the English building, where pedantic professors refused to acknowledge golfers who asked fellow competitors, “What club are you teeing off with?” and instead insisted on “With which club off are you teeing?” The course concluded at the entrance to the philosophy and liberal arts building, where nihilistic professors perused scorecards and pronounced, “You shot a 107, but I’ll give you a 38 because numbers don’t matter and really nothing else does, either.”

Apologies. Just trying to brush up on my fiction writing.

The very first part of that opening paragraph is true, though. There was a Teachers College golf course, across the Mississippi River to the east of the main campus, that maintained a low-key existence for a half-dozen years in the 1930s.

This particular piece of land was not all about golf, however, as noted in the St. Cloud Times of May 2, 1931.

“Acquisition of a six block tract of land in East St. Cloud for use as an athletic field was announced today by President George A. Selke of the State Teachers college. The land lies north of Michigan avenue S. E. starting at a point four blocks east of the end of Tenth street bridge.”

The whole shebang would be known as College Recreation Field, across the Mississippi River from the college’s main campus and one mile south of Minnesota 23. Its most prominent feature would be a new football stadium, but the Times story noted plans to also include a baseball diamond, a running track, tennis and volleyball courts, and — oh, yeah, what are we going to with all of that open land on the north side? …

… “golf course,” the story said.

Novel idea, right? Well, to some extent. But it wasn’t the first campus golf course in the nation. Ohio State, for instance, had one as early as 1919. It wasn’t the first campus course in the state. The University of Minnesota had iterations dating to the 1920s. And the Teachers College course wasn’t even the first in the St. Cloud area. Professors and students alike played the campus course at St. John’s in Collegeville from approximately 1926-33.

From a golf playability standpoint, the Teachers College plot had promise. From an attractiveness standpoint, not so much. “The plot just acquired will require but little in the way of improvements before ready for use,” the Times reported. “The land is literally ‘as flat as a table.’ ”

In conclusion, wrote the Times, “The installation of a small golf course will open the way for new activities at the college. White it is not the aim to open a complete course, several holes will be available for practice and instruction.”

The College Recreation Field was dedicated on June 24, 1931. Its golf course was six holes long and featured sand greens. A.F. Brainard, head of the college’s physical education department, would oversee summer school classes on the course. The golf grounds appeared to have but one adornment, “a pretty group of oak trees, right at the first tee,” the Times reported on June 25. “This is the only clump of trees on the entire property with the exception of a few smaller ones at the extreme south end and the property is ‘level as a table top.’ ”

Selke was said to have struck the ceremonial first shot at the course. He and Brainard were subjects of “moving pictures … that were taken for the school’s permanent records,” the Times reported. However, the college — known today as St. Cloud State University — appears to no longer have any such Selke-Brainard film, according to university archivist Tom Steman.

Steman noted brief references to the golf course in published university material through the mid-1930s. He noted that a college golf team was established in 1932. I could find no evidence that any varsity meets were played at the campus course; old newspaper references mentioned home meets mostly at St. Cloud Country Club or in a couple of cases the public Hillside Golf Course.

Steman speculated that the golf course didn’t last long. “By the fall of 1937,” he wrote in an email, “Selke Field was dedicated (again but as Sports Field) and football and track moved to Selke Field from the Brown Field, which stood just west of Shoemaker Hall on the main campus.”

Update, June 12, 2018: Tom Steman and I have discussed this at length and, ufortunately, cannot determine with certainty exactly where the golf grounds lay. I am concluding with the notion that the course lay to the north of what was in some references strictly considered Recreation Field, marked “G” below.

College Recreation Field and surrounding area, St. Cloud, Minn., 1938 aerial photo from University of Minnesota John Borchert Map Library. G – believed to be golf course grounds; F – football field (with apparent running track adjacent to the east); M – Mississippi River; C – main campus, St. Cloud Teachers College (now St. Cloud State University)

Benton County Golf Course (lost course No. 197)

Published April 1, 1931, in the St. Cloud Times, and not an April Fools’ Day prank:

Three days later, the Times made brief mention of this golf course in a roundup of St. Cloud layouts about to open for the season.

“The Benton County course, situated on the Benton county fair grounds, was opened on Thursday and reports indicate that it will enjoy another successful season. Considerable money has been spent in making this one of the classiest short courses in the community and those in charge report early popularity.”

Like golf on a college campus, golf on a fairgrounds was not a Benton-only notion. A lost golf course on the Roseau County Fairgrounds in the 1930s featured one hole around or over a grandstand. A six-hole course was established in 1928 on the Renville County Fairgrounds. 

However, the notion of a golf course on the Benton County Fairgrounds site, one mile north of Highway 23 in Sauk Rapids, apparently was not greeted with universal enthusiasm.

“There seems to be a misunderstanding on the part of many people of this territory,” the St. Cloud Times reported on July 22, 1931, “regarding the Benton County fair, the principal one being that there will be no fair this year.

“There has been no such on the part of the Benton County Agricultural Society. … The idea probably gained belief because of the fact that a golf course has been in operation on the grounds. The golf course is simply a method adopted by the association to utilize the grounds throughout the open season and to create a revenue to assist in conducting the fair.”

Benton County’s fairgrounds golf course also was a six-holer, put into operation in 1930. It covered 1,800 yards, “is clean and sporty and with well-constructed greens and tee-offs,” the Times reported on March 31, 1931. “The short holes are so situated as to allow interesting hazards and, in several instances, are more difficult than the longer ones.”

I found no evidence of the Benton County course in operation beyond 1931, however, and one person I spoke with at the Benton County Historical Society was unaware that such a golf course had ever existed.

If the original concerns about golf taking over fairgrounds were instigated by Mrs. Swenson of Ronneby being concerned that her blue-ribbon crop of petunias were about to be made null and void by a short par 3, maybe, by 1932, petunias had won out over golf course.

Benton County Fairgrounds, 1936 aerial photo from University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. The assumption is that the Benton County Golf Course that had existed on the fairgrounds site was long gone by 1938, but light circles inside or near the oval track could have been old green sites.
Peter Wong photo

St. Cloud and neighbors IV: St. Augusta, Cold Spring, Richmond

Lost golf courses

If the city of St. Cloud is the heart of our excursion through Central Minnesota lost-golf course country, state Highway 23 is the aorta — the main artery.

Of the 12 lost courses I know of within 30 miles of St. Cloud, 11 of them lie within six miles of 23, the highway that cuts diagonally through Minnesota and stretches 341 miles from Pipestone to Duluth, at one point bisecting St. Cloud. Two of those lost courses are/were within easy earshot of the highway. You know, close enough so that you could have driven past and done something really hilarious like shouting “Fore!” at the top of your lungs. (Or you could have shouted “Fore! You’ll soon be gone!” That might not have been funny, but it would have been spectacularly prescient.)

At any rate, we’ve covered St. Cloud Golf Club, plus Hillside and Wildwood, all Highway 23 neighbors. Another was the three-holer at Rockville, which I’m not counting as a lost course.

I’ll make St. Cloud the starting point for a look at three more lost courses. As before, each course gets a numeric designation as I approach having identified 200 Minnesota lost golf courses.

Springbrook, St. Augusta (established 1930; lost course No. 193)

East of Rockville (and south of St. Cloud) lies the city of St. Augusta. The city’s downtown is at its northeastern corner, next to I-94, but the entirety of the city sprawls across 30 square miles. In the north-central part of the city, not quite a mile north of the St. Augusta Fire Department headquarters and coincidentally the Hidden Lake Disc Golf Course, is a site upon which the targets were not steel baskets but 4 1/4-inch holes in the ground.

“St. Cloud’s first public golf course, Springbrook, will be formally opened next Saturday and Sunday,” the St. Cloud Times reported on April 30, 1930. “The name of the new course implies it’s (sic) natural beauties. A little trout brook meanders through the entire property, necessitating two crossings during the course of a single round. Five pure water springs, giving up nearly ice cold water, are situated so that they are but a short distance from each of the nine holes.

“… Starting from the farm house on the coure (sic), the first hole is directly north, some 400 yards. The second hole requires crossing the brook across a deep gully.”

Further description followed. The course was built on land owned by Charles H. Tanner, who, according to other Times stories, was vice president of Northwestern Oil Company and a St. Cloud Country Club member. Tanner’s wife, Jessie, was mentioned in the Times society pages for doing things like making presentations on India’s caste system. The Tanners lived in St. Cloud and — best guess — probably leased the St. Augusta farm. In the 1930 Times story, it was reported that Mr. and Mrs. Leo Schaefer lived on the farm and would be the golf course caretakers.

Tanner’s farm covered 80 acres at what is now the intersection of County Roads 136 and 115. The farmhouse was on the eastern side of the grounds, with the first hole headed north, as mentioned, probably to the edge of what is now County 115, which took a slightly different path in the 1930s. Tanner’s farm extended south, its likely boundary lying where the northern edge of the Robins Brook Estates development is today.

Tanner enlisted a “Chicago expert” more than a year before the course was established to lay out the course, the Times reported, and “the expert was enthusiastic over the natural possibilities offered by the Tanner farm.” I read this and immediately speculated that the expert might have been Tom Bendelow, a Chicago course architect who designed between 500 and 1,000 U.S. courses and was known as the “Johnny Appleseed of American golf.” But that seems unlikely, because Bendelow had done most of his work well before 1929.

Springbrook (called Spring Brook in some stories) had sand greens, and a picnic area was planned for the grounds. Tanner declined to offer memberships and made course strictly daily-fee. The Schaefers would set up a “refreshment parlor and serve chicken dinners to the golfers and others,” the Times story stated.

Springbrook underwent an uncommon transformation in 1932 with the conversion of sand greens to grass. Most small-town courses in Minnesota in that era featured sand greens because of the relatively prohibitive cost of establishing and maintaining grass greens. The Schaefers apparently were gone by 1932, because the course “Is under new management this year and new patrons are always welcome so long as the rules of the course are observed,” the St. Cloud Times reported on June 4, 1932.

My best guess is that the course didn’t last long past 1932. A real estate transaction in a Times issue suggested that the Tanners sold their farm in 1937, and Charles Tanner died later that year. A 1938 aerial photo of the property offers only vague golf-course forms, suggesting the course had been abandoned years before.

Presumed area of Springbrook Golf Club, 1938 aerial photo, Minnesota DNR Landview Service. The course was on Charles H. Tanner’s farm, which extended slightly south beyond the red borders in the photo. The first hole started just to the north of Tanner’s farmhouse. The highway shown alongside Tanner’s farm on the left (west) is County 136.

Scenic, Cold Spring (1930; lost course No. 194)

Cold Spring has two existing golf courses — River Oaks, just northeast of downtown and established in 1990, and Rich-Spring (1962), southwest of downtown and — natch — adjacent to Highway 23. (“Fore! Not gone! Good job!”)

The one-time existence of a separate, third course just outside the city limits came pretty much as a what-are-you-crazy surprise to a half-dozen Cold Spring residents I talked with.

Cold Spring Golf Club was organized in 1930, and a seven-hole course was organized in Wakefield Township, 1.3 miles northwest of downtown and seven-tenths of a mile northwest of where Rocori High School is today. The course took up a square plot between where today 163rd Avenue turns into 238th street and County Highway 50, though the golf grounds did not reach the highway.

The original club occupied a plot owned by John DeWenter (spelled that by the St. Cloud Times, spelled De Winter on a 1925 plat map). In 1931, the club leased 19 additional acres from Harry Thelen that was used to build two more holes. (Caveat: I can’t unequivocally say this is where the golf course was, as De Winter and Thelen both owned land elsewhere in Wakefield Township, but this was the only place in which the lots abutted, and aerial photographs strongly indicate the one-time existence of a golf course there.)

On April 8, 1931, a St. Cloud Times story indicated that the golf club had appropriated itself with the name “Scenic Golf course.” The Times followed with a grammatical Freudian slip: “The typography of the new land is admirably suited to add snap to the course,” the story read. Ed Honer was hired as course caretaker, and memberships were set at $5 for men and $3 for women and children.

The Cold Spring club faced Albany in a match later in 1931. In 1932, two holes were changed, and several bunkers were added around two greens.

A playing highlight of dubious sorts occurred on May 3, 1936. The Times reported on it the next day. “Ferdinand Peters, president of the Cold Spring Golf club, ‘showed the boys how it was done’ Sunday afternoon when he teed off and his ball struck a swallow. The bird was instantly killed, much to Mr. Peters’ regret, but nevertheless he could not resist the opportunity to ‘Ripley’ the other golfers.”

If the “Ripley” reference escapes you, you must be younger than 50. Google “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”

The golf course likely closed down shortly after Peters’ bird-but-not-a-birdie. A 1938 aerial photo of the area suggested that some of the green sites, which usually are distinct on aerials, had softened around their edges, and I could not find any references to Cold Spring Golf club in the 1939 issues of the Cold Spring Record.

Scenic Golf Course (Cold Spring Golf Club), northwest of town, 1938 aerial photo, University of Minnesota John Borchert Map Library. Presumed sand-green sites can be seen on the left side of the photo. The road at the top-right corner is County Highway 50.

Chain O’ Lakes, Richmond (1931; lost course No. 195)

The 1929-31 Stearns County golf boom continued farther west with the establishment of a course in Richmond.

“The Chain O’ Lakes Golf course opened last Sunday to the public and a full nine-hole course is now available to the public. The course is described as one of the finest in this section of the country,” the St. Cloud Times reported on May 15, 1931.

The course was situated just off Highway 23 at the southern edge of Richmond, where Minnesota 22 headed south to Eden Valley. The course underwent a significant overhaul in 1933, with every green “rebuilt entirely,” the Times reported, “being made much larger and constructed so as to respond to the accuracy designable to the best golfers.” It was not mentioned whether the greens were sand or grass, though the overhaul resulted in greens of “various shapes,” which would have been highly unusual for a sand-greens course.

In 1935, Dr. E.M. Reichert was elected club president. Annual membership was $3 for men and $1.50, and a greens fee of 25 cents was set. Fees remained the same at least through 1935, when Alois J. Lang was elected president. The course was described as par-32, with a length of 3,205 yards (that’s a long course for par 32).

The Chain O’ Lakes course’s end date is unknown. Though a file at the Stearns County Museum suggests it was abandoned in 1939, a 1941 Times news story mentioned the golf course as though it still were operating. I was able to track down Richmond-area residents who remembered the existence of the course but couldn’t offer details or say when it might have closed.

Richmond’s Chain O’ Lakes Golf Course, 1938 aerial photo, University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. The road in the middle of the photo is Minnesoa 23. It intersects with Minnesota 22, heading south to Eden Valley. The golf course is in the bottom portion of the photo. Much of the land is now an oversized water hazard, where East Lake lies in the Horseshoe Chain of Lakes region.

Next: Back to St. Cloud and nearby.

 

 

 

 

St. Cloud and neighbors III: Wildwood, Hillside

Lost golf courses,

Hate to break it to you, Stearns County and neighbors, but you were late to the party.

Fashionably late, let’s say. Not excessively late. But still, late.

While golf boomed in Minnesota in the 1920s — more than 120 courses were built in that decade, more than any other — Stearns County and neighbors mostly idled their Model T’s when it came to puttering out to the golf course.

In 1928, as far as I can tell, there were only three golf courses within 30 miles of St. Cloud: St. Cloud Country Club, established 1919; Little Falls Country Club, 1921; and Clearwater CC at Annandale, 1925. The short-lived campus course at St. John’s in Collegeville (1925-33) hardly can be included, nor can the three- or six-hole concoction at Rockville (1926). (Correction, July 2018: There were at least four. I hadn’t included the fairgrounds course at Princeton, which I learned about after this post was published.) The year 1929 brought more courses — Koronis Hills in Paynesville and three others, which I’ll write about shortly. A 1930 state golf guide lists courses in Eden Valley and Kimball, but I couldn’t find mentions of those clubs in 1929 or ’30 issues of their local newspapers.

Maybe there were more courses around St. Cloud in the early years of Minnesota golf, and feel free to upbraid me if you know of one.  But in any event, the area would not have been your house-afire hotbed of the game in the 1920s.

As bereft of golf as the area was in that period, the final year of the ’20s and first three years of the ’30s brought something most unusual — a golf micro-boom around St. Cloud and Stearns County. By my count, 11 more courses came on board in those three years.

Hello goodbye. Ten of the 11 are now lost courses, Koronis Hills being the only exception.

What follows in this post and the next few are glances at St. Cloud-area lost courses. They are split fairly neatly between west of the Mississippi River and east of it, so that’ll be my dividing line, too. Side note: Because I’m within chip-and-putt range of having identified 200 lost courses in Minnesota, I’ll assign each course a number as I approach — and then reach — that milestone.

I’ll start with the western group. taken in order of their year (or estimated year) of establishment. One caveat: Despite dozens upon dozens of attempts to reach folks who might have had firsthand knowledge of these places, I came up almost universally empty.

Wildwood Golf Course, 1929 (lost course No. 192)

Eight miles west of downtown St. Cloud lies the city of St. Joseph, prominently known as the home of the College of St. Benedict. (Yes, there are more Saints in Stearns County than on the favored side of the pearly gates.) And somewhere near St. Joseph, there once was a golf course.

“A lot of interest is being shown in the St. Joseph golf course,” the St. Cloud Times reported on Aug. 2, 1929. “The nine hole course will be known as the Wildwood golf course. There are nine sporty holes with sand, green and fairways. This is something new for St. Joe and the outlook for a large membership is good.”

Membership fee was $5, and a nine-hole greens fee cost 50 cents. “It looks good to go past the course which is located on the very edge of the village and see it dotted with enthusiasts,” the Times article concluded.

But which edge? Judging by a map of St. Joseph and its spasmodic boundaries, the “edge of the village” could have meant any of about 350 different places.

Here’s a wild guess, and the connections are admittedly thin. But I can offer no more than unfettered speculation at this point, so here it is:

Two miles west of St. Joseph, Wildwood Park lies alongside Kraemer Lake. Two miles north of St. Joe, there is a street named Wildwood Drive. Pure coincidence, most likely, and so is this: The Watab River runs near each of the aforementioned Wildwood locations. In between, the river nudges the western edge of the city, near Millstream Park. Just south of that park, across Minnesota 75, is a triangular-shaped plot of open farmland. The Watab runs along the northwestern edge of that plot. And a 1938 aerial photo of that triangular plot shows faint, possible signs of what could have been a golf course, with distinctive white dots that could have been sand greens, albeit their edges having become “fuzzy.” Which follows, if a golf course there had closed a few years before. All of the Wildwood connections at least hint the course could have been nearby.

Threadbare enough? That’s my theory, and I’m going with it.

The city of St. Joseph and its western edge in 1938. The light, triangular area near the top includes white spots that might have been sand greens on the lost Wildwood golf course. (John Borchert Map Library photo, University of Minnesota)

The Wildwood course had a membership of 30 in 1931, according to the St. Cloud Times, but it probably closed shortly after that. It did not, however, go down without a turf fight. In 1930, as St. Cloud contemplated building a municipal course that would become known as Hillside, a letter writer to the St. Cloud Times advocated for the new muni by referencing “people who drive to St. Joseph and play golf in a pasture.”

One O.D. Jaren of St. Joseph was not amused.

“I do take exception to the word ‘pasture’ as terminology for our location,” Jaren wrote in a Feb. 15, 1930, rebuttal in the Times. “… Some of the greatest golfers in the country (not including myself) have learned the game on a cow pasture course, such as we have here.

“We are not so fortunate as St. Cloud to have donations made to improve our location but such parties who came up here were more than welcome and with the improvements we plan for next year (from our $5.00 yearly fee) we hope to have more of our St. Cloud friends in with us and can assure all that they can enjoy a sporty game even tho a cow or horse has added an occasional hazard.”

Hillside Golf Course, 1930-45

Mr. Jaren’s protest notwithstanding, St. Cloud won out. Hillside Golf Course, one mile west of the Mississippi River on the south side of the city, opened on July 26, 1930, and had a decent run, through the 1945 season and probably outlasting Wildwood by a decade.

Hillside was a nine-hole course redesigned in 1937 by Hugh Vincent Feehan, better known as the original architect of O’Shaughnessy Stadium on the University of St. Thomas campus in St. Paul and original planner of the International Peace Garden near Dunseith, N.D.

1938 aerial photo of Hillside Golf Course. The course was west of Minnesota 75, just east of North Star Cemetery, and partly on what is now Calvary Hill Park. (University of Minnesota John Borchert Map Library)

I won’t write much here about the Hillside course, mostly because I already did in “Fore! Gone.” But I was graced recently with a memory of the course from Ray Galarneault of St. Cloud, who caddied and played the course, including one day in Hillside’s final season.

“I was putting out on the eighth green at Hillside,” Galarneault said, “when sirens went off to say the Japanese had surrendered in August 1945.”

Club-and-ball photo by Peter Wong.

Next: West on 23.

 

St. Cloud and neighbors II: Short a few holes at Rockville

Lost golf courses,

Add “big rockpile” to the list of features occupying land that once was part of Minnesota golf, joining the likes of “elementary school,” “Target store parking lot” and “international airport runway.”

Rockville, Minn., is a city of 2,500 situated 10 miles southwest of St. Cloud on Minnesota Highway 23. It earned the Flintstonian name because of “granite rock formations on nearby streams,” Wikipedia notes, and the city of Rockville website chimes in with “granite is the heart of our city.”

John Clark was a prominent businessmen in Stearns County in the early 1900s. A Scottish immigrant who lived in St. Cloud, he and business partner J.B. McCormack opened a granite quarry at the southwestern edge of Rockville in 1907. That same year, he secured a contract to provide 250,000 pounds of stone for use in building the Cathedral of St. Paul.

Clark’s plot in Rockville consisted of 32 acres, according to a 1925 plat map, and on it he built a two-story house of pink granite from his quarry. Now known as the Clark and McCormack Quarry House, it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Clark and McCormack House, Rockville, Minn.(Joe Bissen photo)

Not that I am overly interested in Clark’s house, despite its distinguished appearance from the corner of Broadway and Pine. I visited Rockville in early May to try to quarry more information from a clip from the Minneapolis Tribune of May 16, 1926.

“Golf Club Organized By Rockville Players,” read the headline.

“Plans are being executed here to construct a six-hole golf course on the Clark estate south of town and organization of the Rockville Golf club is being completed,” the story opened. “The club started last season with three holes. Extreme improvements of the course will be made this season, as the interest in golf develops. The members signed up include Alex Milne, Bob Davidson, Robert Theis, Joseph Rausch, Dominick Rausch, Albert Hansen, Donald Clark, Gordon Clark, Herbert Schneider, Charles Johnson, Arthur Weisman, Alex Clark, Albert Rorthstein and Edward Taufen.”

John Clark, the granite magnate, had died the year before. It isn’t known whether he was a golfer, but as a Scottish immigrant, that certainly is a possibility, plus a possibility that he passed on an affinity for the game to his sons Donald, Gordon and Alex of the Rockville Golf Club. Other members of the golf club were associated with the granite industry, I was told at the Stearns County History Museum.

I never did find any more information, in Rockville, in other newspaper stories or at the museum, as to whether Rockville Golf Club ever expanded to six holes, much less nine or (highly unlikely) 18. An aerial photograph from 1938, the earliest available, shows no sign of a golf course on or near the Clark estate, though there is open land south of the house.

And there’s a big rockpile. Sorry, that’s all I’ve got on Rockville’s lost almost-golf course. Honestly, I don’t even know if the rockpile I saw from Rauch Road, in back of the Clark house, was part of the former golf grounds. When I add it all up, I really can’t count this as an actual lost golf course.

The rockpile.

(Footnote: The three lost-course sites mentioned in the opening paragraph are in Mound, St. Paul and Bloomington.)

Next: Lost, west of the river.

 

 

 

 

St. Cloud and neighbors, Part I: An early, historic loss

Lost golf courses,

St. Cloud, Minnesota, can accurately be described by either of two monikers. Choose your favorite:

  1. “Granite City”
  2. “Central Minnesota’s Geographical Midpoint of Holy Cow That’s a Ton of Lost Golf Courses”

Picked the first one, didn’t you. Hard to argue. For one thing, “Granite City” does roll off the tongue easier than the abomination that is moniker No. 2. For another, the hard-and-durable construction rock — granite — has been harvested in and around St. Cloud since the 1880s, and, after all, golf in St. Cloud has been around only since 1899.

Yes, 1899. I’ll get to it.

Within 35 miles of the St. Cloud city limits, I know of  13 lost golf courses, not including two that never really qualified as full-fledged venues for whiffing and dubbing. This number dwarfs the mere two that I wrote about in “Fore! Gone.”:  the city-owned Hillside course in St. Cloud from 1930-45 and the nine-holer on the St. John’s University campus in Collegeville, circa 1926-33.

I’ll call this my St. Cloud lost-course mulligan. Allow me to cast light on a few more abandoned layouts. Just so you know, it’s going to take multiple posts. Also just so you know, by the time I’m done, I will have come up just shy of the 200 mark in identifying lost golf courses across Minnesota, so I’ll be designating with numbers as I go along.

THERE, AND NOT THERE

St. Cloud Country Club, which nestles up against the Mississippi River on the south side of the Granite City, is one of Minnesota’s classic old golf clubs. Established in 1919, it ranks among the first 35 or 40 clubs in state history. (A 2002 chronology of Minnesota golf courses ranks it among the first 26, but to be perfectly accurate, there are courses that the chronology missed.) St. Cloud CC has hosted one men’s State Amateur championship and two women’s State Ams. The course was, by all accounts that I know of, designed by the redoubtable Tom Vardon.

But it was not St. Cloud’s first golf course.

Take it from the May 10, 1899, edition of the St. Cloud Daily Times.

“NEW GOLF CLUB.” read the headline, with the story following.

“A meeting of those interested in the game of golf was held last evening in the council chambers and the St. Cloud Golf Club was duly organized with 27 charter members,” the newspaper reported. “… The membership fee was placed at $5. It is believed that a large number will become members of the new club as soon as the game is more thoroughly understood.”

To be clear: St. Cloud Golf Club (lost course No. 191), established 1899, and St. Cloud Country Club, established 1919, were, judging by every piece of information I have come across, separate organizations in separate places. There might have been coincidental carryover from GC to CC in the form of members or maybe bylaws, but they are/were not the same golf club.

Two weeks before the formal inception of St. Cloud GC, the Daily Times had offered other details.

Headline, April 24: “GOLF LINKS LAID.”

Story: “For some time the admirers of golf have been aggitating (sic) the formation of a club in this city and it is expected that such an organization will be formed this week.

“The links have been laid by Robert Foulis, of St. Paul, and he pronounces them as the equal of any in the cities, barring the fact that two railroad tracks are crossed here.

“The tee is located at the ball park, and the total length of the links are two and a fifth miles. From the tee to the first hole is 552 yards; to the second from this, 468; to the third, 250; fourth, 480; fifth, 512; sixth, 460; seventh, 296; eighth, 616; ninth, 360, making a total of 3,984 yards.

“The St. Cloud Golf club should start out with a large membership, and it undoubtedly will. O.H. Havill, Warren Freeman and H.R. Welsh are the promoters of the new club.”

Digging into the details:

— The 1899 start date makes St. Cloud Golf Club one of Minnesota’s first nine golf courses, by my count, matched or preceded only by Town & Country Club and Roadside of St. Paul; Winona Golf Club and Meadow-Brook of Winona; Bryn Mawr, Minikahda and Camden Park of Minneapolis; and Northland of Duluth. (This list updates revisions since this was first posted.)

— The mention of Robert Foulis is historically significant. Foulis is a larger-than-life figure from the first decade of Minnesota golf. He was a native Scotsman who worked for the legendary Old Tom Morris at his shop in St. Andrews, then moved to the Chicago area in 1895 and to St. Paul in 1896 as the first professional at Minnesota’s first golf course, Town & Country Club. Foulis’ talents included swing instruction, club making and course architecture. His design and redesign credits (some contributions are disputed) include Town & CC, Minikahda and the lost Bryn Mawr course in Minneapolis, Lake Forest (now Onwentsia) in the Chicago area and Bellerive in suburban St. Louis.

Foulis is correctly credited in some online and printed circles with the design of St. Cloud Golf Club, albeit without noting the distinction between GC and CC, and he is mistakenly credited in other references with the design of St. Cloud Country Club. Foulis hardly could have been involved in the Country Club design, as he had moved to the St. Louis area by 1901 and did most of his subsequent design work in Missouri.

— The length of the course is stunning. A nine-holer covering 3,984 yards, especially before the turn of the 20th century, would have been remarkably long, and a course with a longest hole of 616 yards and nothing shorter than 250 would be daunting even by today’s standards.

— As with so many lost courses, determining the course’s location can be confusing, confounding and ultimately not 100 percent confirmable. Such is the case with St. Cloud GC, though with the help of three researchers at the Stearns County Museum and a few hours of sleuthing on the side, I am more than 95 percent certain of this:

St. Cloud Golf Club was situated near the western edge of the city, near its border with Waite Park and not far north of Division Street. Best guess here and from the researchers is that the course opened near the intersection of 3rd Street North and 37th Avenue, not far from what is now BBC Park, and worked northward, eventually crossing the railroad tracks and probably onto land that is now part of the Electrolux Home Products plant.

Supporting evidence: 1) The reference to “the ball park” in the Daily Times story most likely refers to a baseball stadium in that part of town that underwent improvements in 1911 and 1925. A 1938 aerial photo of the area confirms a baseball park in that area; I have not been able to confirm whether it was St. Cloud’s primary baseball park at the time, but indications are that it was. 2) The reference to “two railroad tracks are crossed here” makes sense because of the two sets of tracks in that area (not to mention an older, out-of-service split and set of tracks just south of the in-service tracks). Also, an entry on St. Cloud Golf Club in the Harper’s Official Golf Guide of 1901 reported that the course was “one half-mile from Great Northern Railroad station, and accessible by street cars.”

Presumed area of the defunct St. Cloud Golf Club, taken from a 1938 aerial photo through the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. Near the bottom-right corner of the photo is a baseball stadium, at or close to the golf course’s presumed starting point, and near the top are the railroad tracks that golfers are presumed to have crossed. Minnesota Highway 15 and part of the city of Waite Park are on the left side of the photo.
BBC Park in St. Cloud, near the presumed starting point of St. Cloud Golf Club. (Joe Bissen photo)

More than a century after St. Cloud Golf Club’s demise, it is impossible to determine anything about its character by scanning what is now flat, urban land. But perhaps a hint can be found in a post on a Northwest Hickory Players blog. In a reprinted interview with golf historian and Foulis expert Jim Healey, Healey described his impression of a typical Foulis course (note that Robert Foulis’ brothers James and David also were course architects):

“Typical of the day, their courses featured the traditional style of that era; namely medium to small greens, teeing areas quite close to previous greens, bunkers that fell into two categories, greenside bunkers with flat bottoms and cross-bunkers featuring tall mounding facing the player and sand on the opposite side.”

The Foulis brothers, from left, Robert, James and David (Wikimedia.org photo)

I don’t know how long St. Cloud Golf Club operated, though I’m thinking 1905 is a number that makes sense. A 1901 Minneapolis Journal story notes that St. Cloud golfers would meet with those of Grand Forks, Fargo, Jamestown, Winnipeg and Duluth to organize the Northwestern Golf Association. Newspaper reports show that St. Cloud competed against Bryn Mawr in inter-club competitions in 1902. In July 1903, a Minneapolis Journal story reported that St. Cloud would be among the new clubs with competitors in the state tournament — but a story in August 1903 from the same newspaper said that St. Cloud was not a Minnesota Golf Association member. An MGA all-time membership roll from 1920 does not list St. Cloud Golf Club as ever holding membership.

A 1904-05 St. Cloud city directory lists St. Cloud Golf Club, with E.H. Hill as president and H.C. Ervin as secretary-treasurer. (Harry Ervin also was secretary-treasurer of the Tileston Milling Company.) But I could not find St. Cloud Golf Club in any newspaper mentions after 1903, and it was not mentioned in a 1910 city directory. The presumption is that the Country Club took up the torch for St. Cloud golf nine years later.

Next: One of the St. Cloud area’s lost almost-courses.