Archive for the ‘Minikahda Club’ Tag
The Mother of All Minneapolis Golf Courses: Bryn Mawr II
Filed under: Minneapolis Golf Courses, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Bryn Mawr, Interlachen Club, Minikahda Club, Minneapolis golf, Minneapolis parks, Theodore Wirth Park
Comments (3) When the golf and social activities of the Bryn Mawr Club shifted to the newly opened Minikahda Club at Lake Calhoun in July 1899, the Bryn Mawr golf course and club house didn’t stand empty for long. Two weeks after the Minikahda Club opened—and promptly became the hub of Minneapolis social life—golfers were already at work to get back on the Bryn Mawr links.
The Minneapolis Tribune on August 9, 1899 attributed the interest in reviving a golf club at Bryn Mawr to “young businessmen who find the Minikahda links at too great a distance from the city.” The paper speculated that the organizers of the new club also expected that the links could be used “at comparatively little expense.” A meeting of those interested in organizing the new club was announced at the West Hotel.
In a little more than a week, the new Bryn Mawr Golf club had been officially created with a membership limit of 200 (compared to Minikahda’s 700) and initiation fees of $10 for men and $5 for women. Curiously, the club was organized as a corporation that was to be limited to ten years. Why that provision, reported in the Tribune of August 18, was made in the club’s organization eludes me, unless it could have been based on a lease for the land. That provision may have been a factor in the creation of another well-known club when those ten years were up.
Initial reports were that the new club would also use the old club house, but that didn’t last long. By the time the new club held its annual meeting on March 19, 1900 prior to its first full season in operation, it already had architectural plans drawn for a new two-story club house that would cost about $2,000. It had “all the necessary adjuncts of a modern club on a small scale,” according to the Tribune.
One reason for the new club house and perhaps a reason the old club house’s previous occupants abandoned it for new digs at Lake Calhoun was revealed when the Minneapolis Tribune reported that the new Bryn Mawr club house would be “erected near the green, so as to avoid the lengthy walk occasioned by the location of the old club house.”
The exact location of the new club house wasn’t cited, but was evidently nearer the present intersection of Laurel and Cedar Lake Road than the earlier Elm Street address. The new club also lengthened two holes at Bryn Mawr making the course a few hundred yards longer. Despite the increased length, the “bogey” for the course (par) was reported in the Tribune as 38, or seven strokes lower than the bogey score when the course was established two years earlier. The Tribune also reported that club member F. A. Stuart had already posted a course record of 42. Players were clearly getting better.
The new club hired a part-time instructor, Martin Watson, who split his time between the Bryn Mawr course and the brand new Lafayette Club course on Lake Minnetonka. Martin was the brother of Minikahda pro William Watson.
The other big golfing news of 1900 in Minneapolis was foreshadowed by an article in the Minneapolis Tribune, June 17, 1900, which reported that Minneapolis Mayor James Gray had tried his hand at golf for the first time at a new St. Paul course at Merriam Park. (The course was bounded by Selby, Summit, Snelling and Prior.) The humorous piece detailed Gray’s adventures on the new course. The afternoon of golf must have made a big impression on His Honor because Harper’s Official Golf Guide, published in 1901, listed a Lake Harriet Golf Club in Minneapolis organized in September, 1900. The listing for the club included Mayor Gray as a “Principal Member.” The listing for the club and its “nine-hole course” in the guide provides no information on the location of the course.
(I can find no other mention of a proposed or actual course anywhere near Lake Harriet. If any readers have more info, I’d love to know.)
The Bryn Mawr course was often referred to in the press as the “businessman’s course.” Newspaper accounts of local golf competitions among clubs noted also that some golfers were members of both Minikahda and Bryn Mawr. Although Bryn Mawr never promoted the social aspects of club life as Minikahda did, the club did expand its offering in 1900 with the addition of two tennis courts and a handball court.
The end of the Bryn Mawr Golf club was announced in the September 4, 1909 issue of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. “When the Bryn Mawr Golf club closes its present season it will move from its grounds…and next year will find the home of this socio-athletic organization farther out in the country,” the paper reported. The paper speculated that grounds would be found beside Lake Minnetonka. It claimed that the old Bryn Mawr clubhouse site would be taken over by a newly organized tennis club.
In late November, however, the Morning Tribune reported quite a different location for the new club. “Options have been secured by the Bryn Mawr Golf club on 150 acres of land bordering Mirror Lake, three miles beyond the Harriet loop and bonds are being sold to enable the promoters to consummate the deal,” the newspaper reported on November 28. The Bryn Mawr Golf club was about to transform into Interlachen Country Club.
The little $2,000 club house at Bryn Mawr was scheduled to be replaced by a $25,000 club house (soon increased to $30,000) at what would become Interlachen. By January 9, 1910 the newly organized Interlachen club announced that it had acquired 146 acres of land between the Brookside and Mendelsohn stations on the Minnetonka streetcar line for the new country club at a cost of about $55,000. Golf play continued at Bryn Mawr for the 1910 season while the new course and club house were being constructed.
The demise of the Bryn Mawr Golf club was best described by a golf columnist of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, May 14, 1911. “The cozy little club with its congenial membership was crowded out by the growth of the city,” he wrote, “and thus passed into history an organization which was within the reach of the small salaried man and yet claimed as members some of the most prominent businessmen of the city.” The Tribune’s golf writer, George Rhame, who was a member of Bryn Mawr and Interlachen wrote in 1913 that Bryn Mawr had “passed into history when the sporty little nine hole course was cut up into building lots.”
With the formal opening of Interlachen Country Club in late July 1911 it became the second child of the nine-hole course and club at Bryn Mawr. Two of the oldest and most prominent private clubs in the Minneapolis area were both given life by Bryn Mawr, the modest little club that could be reached by streetcar.
It’s interesting to note that the location of Interlachen, one of the most prestigious country clubs in the area, was chosen partly because it was accessible by streetcar. “The Bryn Mawr club was one of the most representative clubs in the city, likewise it was democratic,” wrote the Minneapolis Morning Tribune on May 8, 1910. “The necessity arose for more grounds and while the desire was for a country club, it was also requisite that a site should be selected within reach of the members who depend on the street cars for transportation.”
I don’t suppose Interlachen has many members these days who take the bus to play a round of golf.
At about the time that the Bryn Mawr golf course went out of business, the Minneapolis park board was acquiring land nearly surrounding the old course. In 1908 the park board purchased more than 500 acres to add to Glenwood (Wirth) Park west of Bryn Mawr. In 1911 it purchased most of the land for what is now Bryn Mawr Meadow Park. The remaining land along Bassett’s Creek between Bryn Mawr and Glenwood was acquired by purchase and donation in the 1930s.
In the mid-1920s the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners added what was then it’s fourth golf course, Meadowbrook, next door to Interlachen.
David C. Smith
The Mother of All Minneapolis Golf Courses: Bryn Mawr I
Filed under: Bryn Mawr, Lake Calhoun, Minneapolis Golf Courses, Webber Park | Tags: Bryn Mawr, Lake Calhoun, Minikahda Club, Minneapolis golf, Minneapolis parks
Comments (2) The first golf course in Minneapolis was not Minikahda. A year before Minikahda opened, many of its members, Minneapolis’s highest society, played at a course much closer to the central city. The first Minneapolis golf course and club were in Bryn Mawr. The course didn’t last long, a little more than 10 years, but it did spawn two of the more famous golf courses in Minnesota: Minikahda and Interlachen.
When I discovered Warren Manning’s proposal for a public golf course at The Parade in 1903, I became curious about the first golf played in Minneapolis. I wanted to know what led up to the park board creating the first public golf course at Glenwood (Wirth) Park in 1916. I was surprised to learn about courses, or plans for them, at four locations in the city by 1900. The only one that still exists is Minikahda, which overlooks Lake Calhoun.
The first mention I can find of a golf course in Minneapolis — St. Paul already had Town and Country just across the Mississippi River at Lake Street — was in a Minneapolis Tribune article from April 23, 1898, which noted that twenty men who were interested in golf and wanted links closer than Town and Country had met at the West Hotel on Hennepin Avenue for the purpose of forming a Minneapolis golf club. The paper reported, “The grounds proposed are in Bryn Mawr and the high land west, ideal in location and well adapted to links, with sufficient hazards to make the game interesting.” The article also mentioned that the course was advantageously placed near the streetcar line, which ran out Laurel Avenue.
Less than two weeks later, the Tribune reported that the Minneapolis Golf Club had been formally organized, the links were almost ready for play, and a greenskeeper—Scottish, of course—had been hired away from the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, Illinois. He called the new course the “best inland links he had seen,” according to a Tribune article a few days later.
The Bryn Mawr clubhouse was formally opened on June 18. The Tribune reported the next day that several hundred people attended. “An orchestra greeted the visitors with music,” wrote the Tribune, “and there was a stream of handsome turnouts over the Laurel avenue bridge, bringing the women in their lovely summer frocks to smile on the men in their gay golfing suits.”
The nine-hole course measured a bit over 2300 yards with only two holes longer than 300 yards. The first tee was west of the clubhouse and the first green was on the east side of Cedar Lake Road. The second green was across that highway and a small pond.
Par for the course, at that time referred to as “bogey,” was set at 45 strokes. That must have seemed an impossible achievement for club members, based on early scores. At the first handicap tourney on the day the clubhouse opened, Martin Hanley beat a field of 40 golfers for the prize of a box of gutta percha balls. His net score was 101. Adding his handicap of 30, he had actually played the course in 131 strokes! That’s not three over par, it’s nearly three times par. The game was young. Hanley remained one of the club’s top golfers after the club moved to Minikahda.
It’s worth noting that the most thorough description of the new course and club appeared on May 15, 1898 in the Tribune’s society column, not its sports pages. The list of the first 200-plus members reads like a who’s who of early Minneapolis society: Pillsbury, Peavey, Heffelfinger, Jaffray, Rand, Lowry, Bell, Dunwoody, Christian, Morrison, Koon, Loring. The original plan was to admit 150 men and 100 women as members, but the initial number of female applicants was a bit lower than expected at only 62.
The new club had not only a course and greenskeeper, but a club house. The Woodburn residence had been “secured” for that purpose. The clubhouse featured “capacious rooms” and “broad verandas” and was being renovated to provide locker rooms and a restaurant. The location of the clubhouse is indicated by a report in the Saint Paul Globe of July 27, 1898 of a fire at the “quarters of the Bryn Mawr Golf club at the rear of 95 Elm Street.” Elm Street was later renamed Morgan Avenue North. So what was then 95 Elm Street would now likely be in Bryn Mawr Meadows—but that was more than ten years before Bryn Mawr Meadows was a park. The Globe reported that the total loss from the fire was not expected to exceed $200, so it was not likely a factor in the decision of the club to build a new clubhouse in a new—and now famous—location the next year.
Over the winter the members of the Bryn Mawr golf club must have become dissatisfied with the course or clubhouse or both, because the membership built a new golf course and a much grander clubhouse near the western shore of Lake Calhoun, the Minikahda Club.
On June 25, 1899 the Minneapolis Tribune reported, “Although somewhat late in starting its tournament season, the golf club which is now using the Bryn Mawr links until the Minikahda links are completed, had its tournament yesterday afternoon.” Some of the golfers at the club must have been quick learners, because early in the club’s second season scores had dropped dramatically. C. T. Jaffray won the opening tournament with a score of 85. The Tribune noted that the club was looking forward to the opening of the Minikahda clubhouse in “about three weeks.”
Roughly on schedule, the Tribune announced on July 14, “the activities that have centered around the Bryn Mawr links since the first of the season will be transferred tomorrow afternoon to the Minikahda links…The new club house on the west shore of Lake Calhoun is practically finished.”
That was not the end of the Bryn Mawr golf links, but before it was resurrected another Minneapolis golf course emerged. “The Camden Park golf club has been organized among the young men in the employ of the C. A. Smith Lumber company,” the Minneapolis Tribune reported on July 21, 1899. The new club had a membership of 25 and growing. “It plays over a beautiful course of nine holes laid out in the Camden park region and crosses the creek three times,” wrote the Tribune. The reference must have been to Shingle Creek.
As with the Bryn Mawr course, it is not clear that the club owned the land on which it had laid out its holes. Although the Tribune noted that the new club was “particularly fortunate in its course” and that the club “anticipates becoming a large and influential organization some day,” this article is the only mention I can find in Minneapolis newspapers of a golf course in north Minneapolis. A description of the course was included in Harper’s Official Golf Guide published in 1901, with distances and “bogey” for nine holes and the clubs officers. Based on newspaper descriptions of a course that crossed a creek, the course was perhaps laid out on land that became part of Camden (Webber) Park when the park board acquired land for that park in 1908.
Next: The Mother of All Minneapolis Golf Courses: Bryn Mawr II. A new Bryn Mawr Golf Club leads to yet another famous club.
David C. Smith
Minneapolis Park History 