Milaca | Fore! Gone.

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

Less than four miles away, at that.

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

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

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

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

Stop right there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I found this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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