Hard now as it is to imagine Davenport Country Club existing anywhere but its century-long home off of Valley Drive, the record shows that DCC — or a club with a different name but a similar profile — very nearly debuted in one of several different locations in the early portion of the 20th Century.

 

In addition to the Duck Creek site Tom Bendelow weighed against the Lane-Schulz property, no fewer than three other sites were considered for a second Iowa-side country club in the years prior to 1924.

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In 1916, in fact, several influential community and business leaders were well down the Blue Grass Road toward creating what news reports initially referred to as Davenport Country Club at a site six miles west of the city.

 

That effort ultimately was incorporated under the name Royal Oaks Country Club. And while none of the 12 signees to those articles of incorporation would later be among the formative directors of DCC, it’s fair to wonder if Royal Oaks might be known as the Country Club today had the effort come to fruition.

 

For the most part, the would-be founders appeared to be a breakaway faction from Arsenal Golf Club, which debuted in 1898 as the community’s first golf course and country club.

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Moreover, the push for building Royal Oaks on the banks of the Mississippi was led by a serious and accomplished group. It included future Deere & Company President and CEO Burton F. Peek, Iowa National Bank President Frank B. Yetter, prominent Davenport attorney Isaac Petersberger, and Central Engineering Co. founder and multi-time Arsenal Club Champion G. Decker French.

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Joe R. Lane wasn’t identified as part of that effort, but, notably, one member of the formation committee was W.T. Waterman, who had followed his father Charles as a partner in Lane and Waterman around the turn of the century.

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Papers incorporating Royal Oaks Country Club were filed in November of 1916, and a Jan. 18, 1917, headline in the Daily Times claimed, “Country Club to be a Big Success.” A smaller secondary headline announced “Directors Say Nothing Stands in the Road of Their Future Plans.”

 

The story below the headline, however, foreshadowed a different outcome. “The directors deny the rumor that difficulties have been experienced in the initial work of organization,” it read. “They declare there is a wealth of support for the project.”

 

By December, that support, if it truly existed, was gone, and a lawsuit was filed by the Iowa National Bank seeking to recover $2,500 on a note for stock subscriptions.

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On Jan. 11, 1917, the Daily Times announced a search was on for a new site, but Royal Oaks Country Club never came to be.

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In the summer of 1917, another club was proposed on a site near DeWitt. Those efforts would result in 1921 in the creation of Springbrook Country Club, with at least a couple of the former Royal Oaks committeemen involved. The DeWitt club remains in existence today, but even at its founding, the club located 25 miles north of downtown Davenport never fully addressed the community’s desire for an accesible Arsenal alternative.

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Subsequent headlines announced considerations for a Davenport country club just north of the city limits on Brady Street, and another near Devil’s Glen Road in Bettendorf. Neither materialized.

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By the time DCC finally was incorporated on the bluffs above LeClaire, Quad Cities golfers had multiple options. A nine-hole municipal course had opened for public play on Davenport’s Credit Island in 1922. That same year, Short Hills Country Club was incorporated in East Moline. It quickly was followed by Black Hawk Country Club in 1923. That course exists today as Indian Bluff, the Rock Island County-owned course off of 78th Avenue in Milan.

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By then, the winding road to a long-awaited Davenport Country Club was nearing completion.

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Blazing a Trail

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It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Joe R. Lane paved the way to DCC.

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The civil suit to recover unpaid loans filed by Iowa National Bank brought a screeching halt to the earlier effort to build Royal Oaks. So, clearly, there were financial challenges to creating a country club, however well-heeled potential members may have been.

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Lane’s business sense and connections within the Davenport business community ensured the latest effort would end in success. It helped that he was willing to part with his dairy farm and home overlooking the Mississippi River for less than market value.

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Noted the Daily Times on Jan. 14, 1924: “The committee fathering the enterprise had under consideration many sites around Davenport, several of which had been placed under option, when Mr. Lane came forward with an offer to sell his farm at a price which immediately cleared up the financial problems of the club.”

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In March, the club assumed ownership of the entire Lane property. As previously mentioned, purchase price for The Old Roman’s precious dairy farm, nine-bedroom estate, and four outbuildings that included a dairy barn suitable for locker rooms was the aforementioned $65,000.

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For what was described as “an advantageous price,” the club also procured from Reinhardt Schulz the remaining acres needed to accommodate an 18-hole golf course.

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Yet, while Joe R. Lane may have paved the way for DCC, he did not build the road to the Country Club.

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That was the work of Henry C. Dunker, along with a team of mules and a crew that included Dunker’s brothers, wife, sons, and daughters. Among the latter was the future Mrs. Edna Esther Noth.

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Bob Noth experienced his first awareness of the club located just above the hill from his family’s riverside home in LeClaire. While his mother Edna attended to the day’s ironing, Noth well remembers watching an hour-long WOC telecast of the 1951 Western Open at DCC. Later, he ventured up the hill, seeking work as a caddie. Thus began an association that would bring him back as a member years later.

 

Noth’s mother would later share with him memories of her role in shaping Valley Drive.

 

“In those days they used mules and wagons to scrape and shape the road,” Bob Noth noted. “My mother and her sisters were a part of that, as well as their mother. They worked with the guys who basically were the construction crew, and they didn’t drive back and forth to the city every night. They just camped where they were working. My mother and her sisters were part of the crew that provided the meals for the workers.”

 

In the earliest days of DCC’s existence, city-dwelling members often arrived at the club via the Davenport-to-Clinton trolley that stopped below the original clubhouse.

 

Today, of course, few members get to the club without driving Valley Drive.

 

In many ways, that road remains a timeline through history. In its earliest incarnation, it was a stage coach trail carrying travelers up or down river, through the township of Pleasant Valley and the unincorporated village Roswell H. Spencer christened Valley City in 1833.

 

A native Ohioan, Spencer came west and lived for a time in the Rock River valley of Illinois, soldiering in the Blackhawk War.  A year after the battle was won, Spencer crossed the Mississippi and settled in another river valley.

 

A pleasant valley, to say the least.

 

“Historians have written and poets have sung of the beauty of the Pleasant Valley district, and visitors today will agree they knew whereof they wrote and sang,” Darrell E. Doyle posited in an historical overview published in the Dec. 29, 1929, edition of the Davenport Democrat and Leader.

 

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Pleasant Memories

 

More than a decade before Scott County was established and Iowa was granted statehood, Spencer partnered with John D. Stafford to build a flour mill “of pretentious size and of brick construction at a cost of approximately $15,000,” Doyle wrote.

 

The valley on the mighty Mississippi quickly would become “almost congested” with mills of all manner. Be they flour, grist or saw, more mills existed in or near the village than “in any section within 50 miles up or down the river,” Doyle wrote.

 

Yet, the Spencer-Stafford enterprise failed within two years. “So the following year,” the story stated, “Mr. Spencer laid out the lots to what was to become Valley City, and, he probably hoped, an ambitious metropolis.”

 

Valley City was never that.

 

In fact, the small community commonly referred to as Pleasant Valley is not officially a city to this day.

 

Instead, it is a spot-in-the-road unincorporated village that anchors Pleasant Valley Township, which covers 28.5 square miles. That includes each of the 140 acres that are home to Davenport Country Club. But just barely. Spray a shot way right on DCC’s long par-5 second hole and, not only will your ball be OB, it technically will reside within the city limits of LeClaire.

 

LeClaire’s founders had visions of building a metropolis of their own, and they were making strides toward becoming just that in the years before the town was incorporated in 1855.

 

The village was located at the head of a wild section of the Mississippi which Native Americans settlers named Pau-pesha-tuk — translation “agitated waters” — long before they deeded the land to Antoine LeClaire in the aftermath of the Blackhawk War.

 

In “Lansing to LeClaire,” a 2009 travel guide of river communities in Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa, author Dean Klinkenberg described LeClaire as an industrious mid-18th century river town. It was bustling with mills of its own, factories that produced plows and brick, and a nearby quarry that supplied the limestone used to construct the first buildings on Arsenal Island and Old Main at Augustana College.

 

“LeClaire’s position at the head of the rapids ensured it would have a prominent role in river commerce,” Klinkenberg wrote. “LeClaire also had a booming business from the LeClaire Marine Railway. The yards built several steamboats and repaired thousands of others. With the busy river trade came a busy saloon industry.”

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That head-of-the-rapids-headstart notwithstanding, though, LeClaire’s metropolitan dreams, like Roswell Spencer’s mill, fell victim in a mere matter of two years to the vagaries of a boom-bust economy.

 

According to Klinkenberg, the Panic of 1857 caused businesses to shutter and townsfolk to move on. “Davenport went on to become the big city while LeClaire would remain a small town,” he wrote.

 

Time marched on and the old stagecoach trail got more use, as denizens throughout the valley travelled by horse-and-buggy to-and-from the big city. When Henry Ford introduced the Model T around the turn of the century, the road required smoothing and the Dunker family and their mules were up to the task.

 

In 1904, a writer for the Democrat and Leader who identified himself only as an “inconsequential urban loiterer” motored his way upriver, past the abundant onion fields that separated Bettendorf from Valley City in a section of lowlands known far and wide as Onionville.

 

In a piece called “Meanderings in Pleasant Valley,” the author described the landscape in the lyrical, poetic fashion Darryl E. Doyle later would attribute to “knowing whereof they wrote and sang.”

 

The loiterer first meandered through Valley City, past the post office that had been in place “before President Lincoln” and still is there today. He even may have quenched his thirst at the very Valley Inn where more than a few post-round DCC wagers have been settled through the years. Former DCC member Curt Blaum bought and refurbished the old brick inn several years ago, intent on keeping the history of the Pleasant Valley alive.

 

A century prior, the urban loiterer reveled in that history, meandering a half mile east beyond Valley City and discovering “a still deeper valley” that truly moved him to poetry.

 

“For a quarter of a mile, its length borders a creek long celebrated for its picturesqueness,” he wrote. “The waters, mirror-like in reflection, are shadowed by limestone cliffs half as high as the city hall, up which clamber vines heavy with purpling wild grapes, fronded with ferns and seamed with the eroding effect of ages of flowing waters. No pencil can describe the beauty of the scenery.”

 

Some serious singing, that. And much about which to sing.

 

The urban loiterer, of course,  had meandered upon the farthest reaches of the old-boned grounds that two decades later would become Davenport Country Club.