Tag Archives: Lakeville MN

Orchard Beach and Golf Club II: Paradise lost

Lost golf courses, ,

Time should have been on the side of Orchard Beach and Golf Club.

The 1920s were a wonderful time for golf — a boom time. A Minnesota chronology of golf courses published in 2002 lists 71 courses built in the 1920s, and in fact many more that were built weren’t counted in the chronology because they had been long-since abandoned. My best guess is that well over 100 Minnesota golf courses witnessed their first shank-and-a-triple-bogey in the ’20s.

Why all of this building? It was the economy, stu … oh, never mind, no name-calling today. The decade was called the Roaring Twenties for a reason. The middle class for the first time had enough expendable income to take up golf, the wealthy had more means with which to launch courses, and experts and novices alike had access to loading up the Hupmobile with hickory shafts and heading to the first tee.

Community courses, whether municipal or privately owned, popped up almost everywhere. Resort courses appeared, too, whether or not they were established for the purpose of attracting out-of-town golfers. Among them: Breezy Point (1920), Ruttger’s Bay (1922) and Tianna (1925), to name just three. Edina Country Club, originally named Thorpe Country Club and then simply The Country Club, was founded in 1923, a bauble for a large housing development built to accommodate and entertain Twin Cities suburbanites. The golf course and the city’s Country Club District became rousing successes.

So, why not Orchard Beach?

One would think, among this boom, there would have been opportunity for a place like Orchard Beach Golf and Country Club. The project was ambitious but the goal sensible: to build a golf-and-housing development less than 20 miles from downtown Minneapolis in northwestern Lakeville.

Orchard Beach and Golf Club did in fact get off the ground — like one of those 10-winged contraptions you see in old aviation films that lifts off for two seconds before folding up into a garbage heap. The project lasted less than two years and carved onto the Lakeville landscape little more than a small building, a couple of roads and a few strips of cleared land.

The question is, why did it fail?

Afraid I don’t have a good answer. Leo Harmon is the person who would know, but he left us 66 years ago.

Orchard Beach and GC presumably was the brainchild of one Leo Clinton Harmon, a Michigander who left his positions of stature to move to Minnesota in 1926. A former bank president, lumber magnate and entrepreneur (shoes, leather, electricity and baby carriages, among other ventures) in Schoolcraft County of the Upper Peninsula, Harmon left the small city of Manistique in ’26 and, according to a resume’, “moved to Minneapolis to engage in some special reorganization work for the Backus-Brooks Co., and the International Paper Company.” (The resume’ was “prepared by a friend of Mr. Harmon,” apparently published in 1929 and forwarded to me by the Gulliver Historical Society, which is in Schoolcraft County. Marilyn Fischer, president of the Gulliver HS, wrote in correspondence that Harmon is considered one of the “Great Men in Manistique’s History,” and regard for Harmon was so great that one publication held that Harmon claimed to have first devised the use of white safety stripes on highways.)

Leo Harmon, Ancestry.com image via Gulliver (Mich.) Historical Society

Harmon, though a native South Dakotan, former Montanan and longtime Michigander, was familiar with Minnesota. His father was Capt. William Harmon, who served in the famed First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the U.S. Civil War. Leo’s grandfather, Allen Harmon, lived in St. Anthony and Minneapolis, and the Harmon Place Historic District in Minneapolis is named after him. William Harmon operated steamboats between Minneapolis and Anoka and owned the Mississippi River steamer H.M. Rice.

If there were motives for Harmon, at age 54, to emerge from the Upper Michigan forest, where he presumably was wealthy and at least regionally renowned, and move to Minnesota, they are unclear. There is record of him having visited St. Paul on a business trip in 1924; its exact aims are unknown. But at some point, he turned his eyes toward a wooded, lakeside plot in Lakeville, at the time a small town of only about 500.

In October 1926, Harmon, along with Charles R. Hutchenson and M.P. LaFleur of Minneapolis, established Minnesota Lakes Inc. Real Estate, with a charter in Delaware. I failed to dig up any background on Hutcheson, but M.P. LaFleur presumably was Maynard Potter LaFleur, a World War I aviator and former professional hockey player from Eveleth, Minn., who was described in a 1982 Minneapolis Tribune story as a “real estate wheeler-dealer.” He also was dubbed “the Duke of Marquette” because he owned so much land on Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis.

On March 7, 1927, a plat map covering part of the area near Orchard Lake in Lakeville was filed with Dakota County. The area was called Club Park Addition No. 1 of Orchard Beach and Golf Club and included features hearkening back to British literature: Tennyson Court, Burns Plaza, and streets named Longfellow, Byron, Emerson and Milton, among others. (Irony: Wasn’t it Milton who wrote “Paradise Lost”?)

Courtesy Dakota County Historical Society

The first newspaper mention of Orchard Beach and Golf Club that I can find came in the June 11, 1927, edition of the Minneapolis Tribune, with a large advertisement detailing a proposed development with golfing, fishing, tennis, playgrounds and more — “An Ideal Family Private Playground. … Now Being Organized.” The ad featured a listing of advisory board members, with Harmon at the top:

“Mr. Leo C. Harmon, 185 Oak Grove St., Minneapolis, chairman, Inland Water Ways Commission; president of Tri-State Tractor Company; president of Minnesota Lakes, Inc. as sponsors of Orchard Beach and golf club; also president until recently of the First State Bank, Manistique, Michigan.”

Among the nine other advisory board members were D.C. Bennett, Minneapolis architect;  Chris Whitman, manager of The Minikahda Club in Minneapolis (Minikahda Club records list Whitman as its manager from 1916-28); and James Corr of Minneapolis, an architect and civil engineer who coincidentally was listed as surveyor of the Orchard Beach property in the aforementioned plat map.

The day after the ad appeared, the Minneapolis Tribune of June 12, 1927, published a short story headlined “Orchard Club Will Feature Recreation.” “Approximately 1,000 acres of land are being developed for the Orchard Beach and Golf Club, 17 miles from Minneapolis,” the story began. “A feature of the project will be an 18-hole golf course. Charles Harney of Chicago, amateur champion of upper Michigan, is here to lay out the course.”

There is a possible Harney-Harmon connection here. Harney lived in Escanaba, Mich., an hour’s drive from Harmon in Manistique, and won the 1921 Upper Peninsula Golf Association championship. The proposed routing of the Orchard Beach golf course, presumably executed by Harney, appears solid from a golf standpoint, and the prospects were promising, given the varied terrain.

I was unable, however, to find any evidence that Harmon ever did any other golf-course design work.

As mentioned in my previous post on Orchard Beach, it’s clear that work on the golf course and development started in 1926 or 1927, with some land cleared for roads and golf holes. It’s also clear that work stopped abruptly, probably not even 10 percent in. The most plausible explanation is money, that Harmon and/or his investors ran into issues that killed the development. Yet there is no verifiable indication that that was the case.

Leo Harmon moved on from Minnesota. Quickly, it seems. The resume’ prepared by his friend lists him as president of the Mid-West Tractor Company of Chicago from 1927-29. “In the spring of 1929,” the resume reads, “he sold his interest in that business and at the request of Colonel Francis Knox the General-manager of the 28 Hearst (news)papers, he was retained to assist in the needed re-organization of the Hearst South Street plant in New York City where Mr. Harmon served for about two years as the Asst. Business-manager of the New York Evening Journal.”

The resume’ ends at that point. Harmon moved to California sometime in the 1930s and died at age 80 on May 25, 1952, in Beverly Hills.

By then, Orchard Lake and Golf Club was a most distant memory, long since abaondoned.

 

 

 

 

Orchard Beach and Golf Club, Lakeville: Unheard of

Lost golf courses,

On a warm September afternoon, sunny and calm and a blue-ribbon day for golf, I drive south on I-35E, through Burnsville, past the freeway’s east-west merger onto I-35, past Buck Hill, take the next exit and find myself in Lakeville.

I hop off the freeway, head south a half-mile, and pull into the spot where the clubhouse is.

Or was, I guess.

I know it should be here, on this very spot, because I have studied this area closely online for more than a year.

Only … no clubhouse.  Instead, the sign on the door reads:

“Chipotle.”

Thrown off, I stop to regroup. I walk in the door and stride up to the counter.

Me: “Can I just have a small soda?”

Worker: “Two dollars and four cents.”

Me: “And the 2:44 tee time.”

Pause.

Worker: “Sorry?”

Me: “Never mind.”

I got the soda. Not the tee time.

Then again, no one ever did.

Here is an aerial view of 17599 Kenwood Trail in Lakeville, home to the burrito bowls and carnitas of Chipotle Mexican Grill. Red “C” marks the spot:

Below is the same spot, some years earlier. Seventy-three years earlier, to be precise. Again, red “C” marks the spot in this 1945 aerial photo. Only this time, “C” does not stand for Chipotle:

And below one more time, a 1927 newspaper ad promoting development of the immediate area. This time, there is an inscription next to the red “C”. Inscription reads “Golf Club House.”

This, just to the west of the flagpole, was to be the point of departure for 18 holes at Orchard Beach and Golf Club in northwestern Lakeville. But the flag, it is presumed, was never raised, and Orchard Beach instead ranks as the most unheard-of and mysterious lost-golf course site (almost-lost, to be perfectly accurate) I have come across.

A larger look at what was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club:

This is the top portion of an advertisement that appeared in the June 11, 1927, issue of the Minneapolis Tribune. The ad occupied two-thirds of a page. You can click on it to see more detail.

The preceding October, another ad had appeared in the Tribune. “Orchard Beach and Golf Club,” read the large type. In smaller type, the ad crowed: “The Most FASCINATING and SCENIC PLAYGROUND That Has Ever Been Opened to the Public.”

Hyperbole has always been a staple in golf-course promotion. This was hyperbole on Roaring Twenties steroids.

The crowing added up to a veritable din when weighed with the full ad:

These ads were just two in a series that blitzed readers of the Minneapolis Tribune in 1926 and ’27 — at least nine large display ads in June and July of 1927, plus a handful from earlier in ’27 used to recruit a sales force. Orchard Beach and Golf Club, the ads suggested, would be nothing like Twin Citians had ever seen. And it wasn’t just golf and a lake that were proffered to reader/buyers. Other ads and newspaper stories promised tennis, playgrounds, an athletic field, parks, an aviation field and a large residential development — all situated, according to an October 1926 ad, “amid rolling hills generously wooded with the virgin growth of beautiful hardwood trees and a myriad of the various wild flowers painted by Dame Nature.”

OK then.

Orchard Beach — the club, golf course and housing development — was to have encompassed an area that is loosely bordered, in 2018 terms, by Kenwood Trail on the east, 172nd Street West on the north, the southeast corner of Orchard Lake on the northwest and 185th Street West on the south. The western border likely includes parts of at least three holes on what is now Brackett’s Crossing Country Club (nee Honeywell Country Club, established in 1961). Within those proposed Orchard Beach and Golf Club confines, there is now a large, upscale residential area to the immediate east and northeast of Brackett’s Crossing, including Prairie Lake Park; the Queen Anne Courts mobile home neighborhood; and a less densely developed section of homes and hobby farm-ish land along 172nd Street and near Orchard Lake. Orchard Beach’s golf course was to be built mostly in the latter two areas.

Orchard Beach Park, Lakeville, May 2018

But the surf ‘n’ turf that was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club never quite worked out. No tee time was ever reserved, no ace served, no seesaw seen, no aerial landing landed. I can find no documentation of the project dating to 1928 or later, and the project is so unknown that one might as well suggest the Loch Ness monster once inhabited Orchard Lake as to suggest there ever were big plans for the neighborhood. I contacted or tried to contact three historical societies, one courthouse and at least a dozen residents or former residents of the area, including at least three parties who live smack-dab on top of what was to be the golf course, and never heard so much as a whisper of knowledge of the Orchard Beach project.

Yet the current lie of the land indicates site work was started, and documents confirm it.

“A sporty 18 hole golf course is under construction,” read part of a June 1927 ad in the Minneapolis Tribune. That same month, the Tribune ran a story headlined “Orchard Club Will Feature Recreation.”

“Approximately 1,000 acres of land are being developed for the Orchard Beach and Golf Club, on Lyndale avenue south, 17 miles from Minneapolis,” the story read. “The project is planned as one of the most completely equipped private recreational grounds in the northwest. The work has been under way since last fall.”

Orchard Beach would not have been Lakeville’s first golf course. The 1920s marked the heyday of golf at Antlers Park Golf Links, an offshoot of the popular Antlers Park Amusement Park owned by George O’Rourke on the southeastern shore of Lake Marion, only three miles southeast of Orchard Lake. In August 1927, as construction of the Orchard Beach course presumably was underway, the Dakota County Tribune ran a story under the headline “Antlers Golf Course Is Attracting More City Artists,” and noting the Antlers Park course had been expanded from nine to 18 holes. (The Antlers Park course closed in 1938.)

It’s likely that Antlers Park and Orchard Beach would not have been direct competitors. Antlers was a public course, while Orchard Beach would presumably have been private, limited to paying members of the club, or perhaps open to the public but at a higher greens fee.

————————–

Orchard Beach and Golf Club is, to steal without apologies to Sir Winston Churchill, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It’s 99 percent certain that the project started, but it’s even more certain it was never finished. As with any worth-its-salt mystery, clues have been left. Some are stored in aerial photos.

What follows is something of a time-lapse sequence of the area southwest of Orchard Lake, i.e. the proposed home to Orchard Beach and Golf Club. No aerial photos before the mid-1930s are readily available, so the 1927 proposed development, shown earlier, can be used as the earliest reference point.

In 1937, this is how the area looked. Though the Orchard Beach project had presumably been abandoned for a decade by then, clear signs of it remain. I marked the general confines of the proposed development with a red border and letter-coded other notable landmarks, either likely or speculative. (All but one aerial photo in this post are courtesy of the University of Minnesota’s John Borchert Map Library. Click on the images for closer looks.)

L — Lyndale Avenue. At the time, this was the main drag out of downtown Minneapolis, through Bloomington, across the Minnesota River and south to Lakeville.

R – Railroad. This was the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern Railway. In the 1920s, it was known as the Dan Patch Railroad, an electric and then steam line whose stops included Antlers Park.

C – Orchard Beach and Golf Club clubhouse. I have no verification that this building was in fact the clubhouse, but its location is a near-exact match with the drawing in the 1927 Minneapolis Tribune ad.

R2 – Road. And nothing more, really, except one of the clearest indications that work had been done on the Orchard Beach development. The road marked the southern edge of the proposed golf course, traveled west, turned north, and eventually connected with 172nd Street West. In the 1927 ad, the road can clearly be seen cutting through the middle of the proposed development.

O and BP — Orchard Lake and what the developers dubbed Orchard Lake Beach Park. Today, Orchard Beach Park lies in almost exactly the same place.

S – Streets — or, more accurately, proposed streets. Compare the pattern of rectangles with the same in the Tribune ad. No houses are apparent along these rectangular lines, but the lines do indicate that land was cleared for the purpose of putting in streets.

Moving along to 1945:

What’s notable in the eight years since the 1937 photo? Not all that much, except for notable improvement in the resolution of aerial photography. But this land stayed largely the same, except for more development to the east of Lyndale Avenue. This photo lends veracity to the notion that land had been cleared almost 20 years earlier for the purposes of building a golf course. I sketched the proposed routing on this photo, in green lines that correspond to the 1927 drawing. Best guess is that land was cleared for about half the course in 1926 and ’27 before the project was stopped for unknown reasons. This sketched routing is entirely plausible for the path of a reputable 18-hole golf course, and an accomplished (not renowned) golfer was hired to design the course. I will post more about the project’s principals shortly.

Click for a larger look at the photo and see if you know anyone who might have lived on one of these “holes.”

By 1957 (below), U.S. Highway 65 had been built; it cut through the southeastern corner of what was to be Orchard Beach and Golf Club. Within a decade, the route would become I-35:

A look at 1964:

A few more roads had been built near Orchard Lake; the road that cut through the south side of the property had effectively disappeared; and, most notably, the mobile home park now known as Queen Anne Courts had been built near I-35, between Lyndale Avenue and the defunct railroad line.

Finally, 2018 (U.S. Geological Survey photo):

O – Orchard Lake

G – Area of proposed Orchard Beach golf course

B – Brackett’s Crossing Country Club

C – Chipotle/Orchard Beach and Golf Club clubhouse

Next post: The people behind Orchard Beach and Golf Club and the mystery of its demise.