St. Paul, Minnesota, October 22, 1930

Dr. E. L. Kannary,
President, Town and Country Club,
St. Paul, Minn.

My Dear Doctor:

I have been asked several times to give to the Club my recollections of its origin and early history and more particularly of the beginnings of golf at our Club.

From a chronological standpoint, I am better qualified to do these things than any other member for I have been a member of the Club continuously from the time it was organized in 1888, being the only charter member left, and I started golf on the identical grounds which we are now using in 1893.

My recollection of the early history of the Club is naturally rather vague but since all of our records have disappeared down to our Minutes Book which begins in December, 1898, the following may be useful to such members as are curious to know what happened in the early days and such recollections cannot be officially controverted, so here they are:

The Club was organized by a small group of young men called to meet at Poverty Flat, then located at the top of Third Street hill, and was attended by about a dozen, most of whom are now dead and all of whom were good sports, interested in athletics and social activities, chief among which at that time, the early winter of 1877-88, were the activities of the Carnival Clubs.

This group met to get up a Carnival Club and, if I remember rightly, just before our second winter carnival. Some of the group could not get into the Nushkas, which was the first and liveliest of the Carnival Clubs, some did not altogether approve of their liveliness which, to say the least, they considered undignified, and the rest felt there was need of another Carnival Club, so we organized for that purpose and we functioned that winter in rather a sedate way in our beautiful costumes of dark blue trimmed with astrakhan.

As a Carnival Club, we did not have very much fun, were perhaps too dignified and the carnival spirit had passed its climax. So the Club began thus early its series of flops which characterized its early history.

We then got in a group of older men, among them Will Merriam, Colonel Lamborn, my father, Emerson W. Peet, George Squires, Walter Morton, Colonel Bement, Judges Nelson and Flandrau, Frank Clark, Colonel Bates, etc., etc., who conceived the idea of turning the Club into an all-the-year-round club with a home somewhere in the country within easy driving distance which would serve as a destination for drives, a good place to eat (and drink) and play tennis, and stroll around the country.

It was about that time that we organized officially with a constitution and by-laws and a full set of officers. To quote from our Articles of Incorporation:

“It’s general purpose and plan of operation shall be the conducting of a club or society for the purpose of social enjoyment and culture and the renting, leasing or owning of a club house to be situated in the environs of said City of St. Paul, and the operation of the same;” etc, etc.,

We started with little property, most of which was acquired by contribution when we rented a house on the banks of Lake Como which we proceeded to furnish largely from the castoff furniture of contributing members. That furniture, by the way, would have been of great value now if it had been preserved for it was antique then and that was forty-two years ago.

We made a very decent club house of the old brick home whose extensive grounds reached down to the shores of Lake Como, which was then very much in the country, but it was not quire far enough away to make it a good drive, there was not much to do when we got there, and the club languished. It was saved only by the skill and efficiency of our first chef, Montant, a

little, fat Frenchman who with his wife and a yard man constituted our entire staff, and who had the magical quality of being able to produce any kind of fish, flesh or fowl and prepare the most delicious meals with our without notice. I cannot remember just how long we occupied this home, perhaps two years, but I do remember that the Club then had not sufficient reason for existence, did not attract new members and was distinctly a flop – No. 2:

About that time, my father conceived the idea of the Club buying a site and building a real club house midway between the cities which would be a good drive from either city and attract into the Club a group of Minneapolis people thereby cementing the social relations, which were then and have been ever since rather frigid. We got quite a bunch of nice people from Minneapolis. Our membership list, dated 1891, shows twenty-four plus wives from Minneapolis out of a total membership of one hundred thirty-three plus wives. But we never substantially increased the Minneapolis membership partly because it was a most unattractive drive from the residential section of Minneapolis to the Club and party because the Minnekada Club was organized a little later in Minneapolis and took in most of the element from which we expected to draw.

We bought, I think in ’90 or ’91 –here is where our records would come in handy if they existed – a few lots where our present club house is located reaching to the river, for the River Boulevard was not dreamed of then, and reaching practically as far as the eye could see in every direction, for there were no houses nearer than Merriam Park and no streets excepting Marshall Avenue nearer than Cretin on the East and St. Anthony of the North. It was then, as it is now, a beautiful tract of land, wild enough to please the nature lover but cleared enough by Merriam Park cattle, of which more later, to present the appearance of an English country estate.

I do not recall what we paid for the lots, probably not more than a few hundred dollars for the tract which we bought for I remember distinctly that I bought two lots adjoining, where the putting course now is, for fifty dollars a piece and that Ambrose Tighe bought the rest of the lots between the club property and Marshall Avenue for a few hundred dollars. We both subsequently turned our lots over to the Club at cost, so the Club owned at an early date a substantial tract of land bounded by Marshall Avenue, the river, the ravine at our North and what is now Otis Avenue on the East, which could not have cost more than three thousand dollars. Therefore, as a real estate owning enterprise, we were a great success in the early nineties, as we are now on a much larger scale.

I remember we had great difficulty in raising the money necessary to build the clubhouse, somewhere around $25,000, I think, and that we resorted to the time-honored method of issuing bonds to members for this fund which bonds, unlike most such bonds, were eventually paid.

As a Club, we prospered moderately for we had a corking good clubhouse, we still had Montant, which meant good meals, the drive out there was rather pleasant and the country around the club house was exceedingly attractive. We tried to attract patronage by installing a bowling alley, the remains of which recently serves as a bridge across the ravine between the tenth and eleventh holes, a shuffle board, a billiard table and a half dozen of the fool games with which the English and Candadians fill their country clubs and seem to greatly enjoy. These things did not, however, appeal much to our members, hard times kept out new members, Minneapolis people began pulling out and the dues were the only things about the Club that kept up. This period might reasonably be called flop No. 3, for we were awfully near bankruptcy and dissolution, when – BICYCLING CAME ALONG.

That sport hit the country with nearly as great force as roller skating and, more recently, dancing and nearly every member learned to bicycle and rode with some regularity to the Country Club which was plenty far for bicycling and was over a pleasant terrain all the way after we had made a tan bark path from Summit Avenue to the Club through the woods. I do not remember whether or not bicycling increased our membership but it did certainly increase the use of the Club and was a very agreeable interlude while it lasted which, however, was a very short time, perhaps a couple of summers.

About the time that sport waned and we were again looking for a reason for existence, the following incident occurred which marks the BIRTH OF GOLF, the real cause of our permanent prosperity. A young newspaper reporter on the Dispatch, one Charles Hawkes, was compelled by the management to divert his attention from the market page to furnishing enough social items to fill a half column twice a week. This was very distasteful to him and he shirked the job outrageously, contenting himself with calling on a dew young men who liked him well enough to dig up a few items concerning what was going on in the clubs and in society generally. He blew into my office in JUNE, EIGHTEEN HUNDRED NINETY-THREE on this mission and after telling him all the social news that I could think of, I suggested that he write an article about the game of golf, which was then beginning to be mentioned in Western papers. Neither he nor I knew of anything about it and as he was too lazy to consult the encyclopedia or any authentic source, he contented himself with the untruthful announcement that I purposed starting the game at the Country Club. That announcement brought in to my office the next day George McGree, an importation from Scotland, who expressed high approval of my alleged plan and offered to help me. Knowing the needs of the Country Club, I toyed with the idea for a day or two and finally took McCree out to the Country Club with my lawn mower in the back of my runabout and, with the assistance of the yard man, we cut the grass on the FIRST GREEN EVER USED FOR THE GAME OF GOLF WEST OF NEW JERSEY.

I think that green became the ninth when McCree finished laying out the other eight and that our first tee was across the ravine about where the seventeenth is now and that we rambled back and forth on that plateau crossing the big ravine a couple of times and ran nearly up to Cretin and St. Anthony. It was corking nine-hole course, nearly as good as the fairway as it is now because it had been used as a free pasture by the Merriam Park people for many years and the grass was short, there were no bushes and but few tree and no obstacles other than the cattle, which were our first and most serious hazards. They soon learned to congregate on our greens where the grass was short and sweet and we had to send our caddies ahead to shoo them off. We never could train our caddies to retrieve balls which landed in their spoor and as the solid gutta percha balls cost a quarter each, the game was even then rather expensive. Some of our most prominent members probably recall this situation for at that time they drove the cattle back and forth between their Merriam Park barns and their pasture on which we poaching, and when not so engaged caddied for the small group who were then playing.

I do not recall just when we ceased to be poachers on this tract and became renters but I think it was in 1895 and I know that we leased our land on the very advantageous terms of paying the taxes. It was several years before we bought first one tract, then another to finally acquire our present magnificent holdings and it involved much financing not only to pay for the land but also to pay for paving and all sorts of other improvements with which we were surrounded. This financing was, of course, made possible by the fact that during that period golf had built up the Club to several hundred active and interested members. Subsequently, as all will remember, the membership increased to the point that the Somerset Club was badly needed and we could spare the hundred or more members who left us then and soon have a waiting list.

The early financing of the links I remember well for it involved much bitter fighting with the Club’s executive Committee who were very loath to believe golf was needed or could possibly last. The fighting began in the summer of ’93 when a self constituted golf committee, Dick Stewart and myself, requested fifty dollars with which to buy a set of real golf holes and flags to replace the tomato cans and fish poles with red rags tied upon them, then in use, also a whole cutter, also a lawn mower. Charlie Gordon who, strange to say, was then sitting on the lid, quite profanely fused on the ground that golf was a damn silly game which could not possibly last. As I had more influence with the executive committee, my father being President at the time, we got the fifty which was, I think, all that we spent in ’93. In ’94, we started with a magnificent appropriation of $200 with which we promised to create a real golf links. Charlie Gordon was not so vehement in his denunciation of the game as he had played a little in ’93 and he soon landed at the receiving end of the appropriations where he demanded and got without a quiver thousands of dollars to make a real course which “real course” we shall never finally attain so long as we have an efficient and eloquent greens committee.

Golf did not burst into its full glory for several years, not more than a dozen played that first summer nor more than two or three dozen the second and they did not brag about it for more robust sports like rowing on the river, tennis, horseback riding, fishing and shooting, which we could then do almost in the suburbs of St. Paul, were then the vogue and it took some mental courage for a real heman to chase a little white ball in the course of a very sissified game. But we the beginners teased one man after another to try it out and one lesson was all that was needed to make a convert even then, as now.

I well remember introducing Mil Griggs to try one shot. He was then a noted baseball player, a recent captain of the Yale Nine, and his mind and muscle coordinated perfectly, as they do to this day. He grasped my driver with a Babe Ruth stance, hit the ball a mighty swat straight and far and continued to hit it with the most awful form conceivable but with deadly accuracy until he completed the course in what was, I am sure, the course record. From that day on he has been making golf records, golf courses and Golf Clubs with distinguished success.

The real players of those early days were Will Armstrong, of blessed memory, Jim’s older brother, who was the best all ‘round athlete and the best fellow St. Paul ever produced.

Frank Cutcheon who was no athlete and of poor physique but became a first rate golfer teaching us incidentally that trained muscles were not necessary for golf.

Almeric Paget recently from Le Mars, Iowa, where English younger sons were sent for higher education in farming, polo and poker, now known as the Marquis of Queensberry. He was a real golfer for he had learned the game in England.

William Henry Patterson, Ben Schurmeier, who devoted the balance of his life to beautifying and keeping up our grounds, Will Lightner in ’97, I think, Tan Langford in ’98, Harold Bend in ’99, Louis Hull of Minneapolis, the football hero whose only defect was that he would drive over to the Club with his four-in-hand, and, Oh, a host of others many of whom are still with us, thank God.

Now, and this is the nub of my story. We began playing on our present course in 1893 and have played on the same ground continuously ever since. This, I believe, entitles us to the distinction of owning the second oldest golf links in the United States continuously occupied by the same Club. There are one or two older golf links in Canada and only one older in this country that is owned by the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. This club whose links are near Southampton, Long Island, was incorporated as a golf club in 1891, the first incorporated GOLF club in the United States, and started out in a blaze of glory with untold millions behind it, in the summer of ’92 on the same God given course that they are now using. At that, they hadn’t much on us except the millionaires for, while the architect of their first club house was Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White ours was the great Cass Gilbert, and God never gave us anyone a natural course better than ours was, and still is.

St. Andrews, near Hastings-on-Hudson, was started by John Reid the “father of golf if America,” way back in 1888 with dues of five dollars a year, six small putting greens in the suburbs of Yonkers, New York, a locker room consisting of John Reid’s apple trees upon which to hang their coats and his vestibule in which to keep their clubs. They moved to Grey Oakes in ’94, then incorporated in ’95 and moved again to their present links, Mt. Hope in ’97. They brag of having in their club house some of the “old Tom Morris’s” clubs given to John Reid before he left Scotland. Even in that, they haven’t much the best of us for George McCree Gave to our Club a midiron which he had either bought from or been given by the same Tom Morris before McCree left Scotland and our club’s servants, not realizing its value, promptly lost it. Our careless disregard for valuable antiques is most regrettable. Even our famous “courting sofa,” given us by Mrs. Gussie Pope and probably going straight back to General Sibley, now has disappeared and that’s a pity for it was so shaped that the occupants of either end were thrown into each other’s arms, hence it’s name.

To go on with the other antiques,--the early Golf Clubs of this country. Baltusrol, near Orange, New Jersey, did not even buy their land from Baltrus Roll until ‘95 nor build their links until ’96.

The Tuxedo Golf Club was incorporated in’94 and evidently had some sort of links that year for the first inter-club tournament in this country on record seems to have been held there between Tuxedo and Shinnecock in July, ’94.

These are supposed to be the four oldest golf clubs in our country and only one of them, Shinnecock, has played on its links longer than we and none were incorporated prior to ours, ours dating back officially to February, ’88 and Shinnecock to September, ’91. Of course, we did not incorporate as a golf club, but we became one the spring of ’93, so let’s claim that we are the OLDEST GOLF CLUB IN THIS COUNTRY, with the SECOND OLDEST LINKS CONTINUOUSLY PLANYED ON and, incidentally, with the best links.

I claim for myself the distinction of not only starting golf but being the Western Champion for 1893 uncontested as there was practically no one to contest it then. Also the doubtful honor of being the oldest living member of the Duffer Club with the good old 100, the duffer’s par, as my goal. The reason that many of us never get permanently out of the Duffer’s Club is that when, by patient practice and prayerful concentration we succeed in brining our scores below a hundred with some regularity, the fool golf committee immediately proceed to stiffen up the course by moving back the tees, sprinkling in some hazards and generally indulging in their mad orgy of spending the Club’s money on the course. That immediately adds two or three, or four to our scores and puts us back in the Duffer Club. The only way to beat the Committee and to beat the game is to either keep your mental score by an average of sixes instead of the usual average of fives, since three over six, for example, is not half so humiliating as twenty-one over five or, better refrain from adding your total score and settle with your opponent on the basis of match play rather than medal play. English golfers claim, very wisely, that American golfers miss half the joy of the game in their ambition to beat their own scores. It took me many years to learn the fact and I give it to you gratis for what it is worth.

In 1895, thirty-five years ago, the Club took over Tom Williams, the bar keep, or, to be more accurate, Tom took us over. For many years, and up to prohibition days, he was the busy boy around the place and during that period he earned the restful sinecure which he has ever since enjoyed of dispensing soft drinks to the less thirsty members. In the good, old days, the nineteenth was some hole. Nick a mere child in our service, only eighteen years.

I think one more chapter should be added to what seems to be developing into a book. This chapter is intended to give credit where credit is due, to the old Country Club golfers for their usefulness in starting golf elsewhere in and around St. Paul.

Chronologically that began about thirty years ago with the highly successful formation of what was then known as the Roadside Club, situated on Summit between Lexington, Selby and the railroad track. This big tract, known as Anna E. Ramsey’s Addition, was practically vacant; bare of houses and even streets and was, of course, very close to our residential section.

A group mostly of women who could not afford the Country Club, urged Billy Trowbridge, one of our leading young players, to help them start a club there, which he did with the assistance of our pro and a bunch of our members and it developed into a rattling good golf club with an excellent course.

We had four our club house the only house on the tract, then vacant for it was too far out in the country to rent. We furnished it beautifully, trust the women for that, and played there for several years, six or seven perhaps, with great joy and at very little expense, until we were driven out by the encroachment of streets and houses.

Not long after that an unsuccessful effort was made by a bunch of our Country Club golfers to start municipal golf there. There were then a very few municipal golf links in this country and in our misguided enthusiasm we thought the time was ripe to start one here, so we hunted around Como Park and found back of the Workhouses a tract of perhaps twenty-five acres which belonged to the City and was not then and is not yet used for park purposes, or for anything else, quite suitable for six holes to which could be added three more in the park. We took a lot of trouble over this matter, got Watson, the great links expert, to lay it our and blue print it and properly fortified ourselves with the argument that the workhouse borders could make and keep it up and that the whole thing would cost the City almost nothing. We secured the backing of Nussbaumer, the Park Superintendent, and presented the plan to the Council, but not one of them could hear us. There were no votes at that time to be landed by favoring a municipal golf links for there were practically no golfers among the proletariat. So the plan was unanimously vetoed without discussion and with pitying smile from our city fathers.

Larry Ho, Who was then a reporter on the Pioneer Press, learned of the plan and wrote an article for his paper which was almost vitriolic enough to burn up the paper. According to him, golfers were dudes, idlers, fools degenerates, and the game was the idiot’s delight. The half column devoted to demolishing our harmless pastime probably se back municipal golf in St. Paul for a decade and would crucify an office seeker today. Fortunately for Larry, few remembered it when he ran for office and those few credited him with a radical change of heart.

In 1911, L.P. Ordway started golf in connection with the White Bear Yacht Club. With his usual vision, he had bought forty acres North of the railroad track to protect the rear of Dellwood and probably in the back of his mind to provide a playground of some sort for the Yacht Club. It was the God awfulest forty you ever saw, full of hills, valleys, stumps and underbrush, with absolutely no promise of a golf links, but it served as a starter. We bought the Arkell seventy acres adjoining on the East and subsequently eighty more North of the Stillwater road and all of us lived at the lake went to work to raise the very substantial sum needed to make this wild and unpromising land a real golf links. Billy Mitchell, excuse me, Attorney General Mitchell, contributed a lot of his time and a very large amount of his money, subsequently recovered, to this enterprise, and the old Yacht Club sweat blood for years to finance and maintain it. We are all familiar with the results, the sportiest and one of the best links in the Northwest, worked over, prayed over and put to bed every night for the past seventeen years by good, old Tom Varden.

A few of us who lived on Manitou Island, unwilling to travel three miles for golf, laid out and used for several years a very decent little nine-hole course in the suburbs of White Bear, which gave many men and some women much needed practice for the three years or so during which is was undisturbed by the growth of that village.

The same group of country club golfers, headed by the same old right and left bower of golf, Griggs and Gordon, or perhaps Gordon or Griggs, were largely responsible for the birth of the Highland Park Municipal Links, and another group headed by Homer Clark bought a large part of the land on which the Keller course is now situated to hold for the county against the time when it would be needed foe a golf course.

The last and most successful baby sired by the Country Club and damned by a lot of its members is the Somerset Golf Club, again the works of Griggs-Gordon, et al., and their wisdom eleven years ago in creating a fine club, partially at least, to relieve the congestion at the Town and Country has been amply vindicated.

It is, of course, natural that this group of old-time golfers should be the ones that did all these things and more for the game for before 1910, let us say, the Country Club players were all the golfers there were. There weren’t any more. But the present generation of young golfers should yield them tribute for their activity, their liberality and, above all, their vision or, at the very least, should know who they are and something of what they did, hence this interpolated chapter. May the long continue to enjoy the fruits of their industry in an old age resulting from and made sweet by this fine, old game!

One more thought in closing. I have several times suggested that I consider the Town and Country the best as well as the oldest golf club in this country and I think the chief reason for that is its predominant characteristics, kindliness and courtesy. A few of us old-timers have resisted the attractions of the Somerset Club chiefly because we feel certain of being able to butt into a game any day without pre-arrangement at the Town and Country Club. The young fellows, usually strangers, seem to be glad to have us join them and even cheerfully give up their caddies to guide our tottering steps. What more can be asked of a golfer!

Yours Cordially,