They came from Arsenal Country Club, many employing dual memberships at the two Iowa side clubs.

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They followed friends from The Outing Club, the swank social gathering spot on the Brady Street hilltop that opened in 1905 and, like DCC, still is thriving today.

 

They came from the suddenly growing neighborhood on the bluff between LeClaire and Valley City, some seeking only a summer getaway from the city heat.

 

The earliest members of Davenport Country Club had much more in common than a growing interest in the game C.H. Alison, Tom Bendelow, Art Andrews and so many others with roots in the United Kingdom sought to import to the States in the early portion of the 20th Century.

 

The Country Club was another social haven to be shared with close neighbors, good friends, and associates in the businesses and factories that grew and flourished over the latter half of the 19th Century in an emergent industrial community joined by a river.

 

A primary catalyst for the region’s growth had been the steel plow an itinerant Vermont-born blacksmith began mass-producing after setting up shop in 1848 on the Mississippi River’s eastern shore.

 

The city of Moline arrived behind John Deere’s plow in 1872, joining the already established communities of Rock Island (1835) and Davenport (1839) to form what then was known far-and-wide as the Tri-Cities. The community later would be known farther and wider as the “Farm Implement Manufacturing Capitol of World.”

 

In 1903, both East Moline and Bettendorf were established, setting in motion a still simmering debate over which community owns the rightful claim to fourth-member status among the Quad Cities.

 

Although already as diverse as the melting-pot nation that surrounded them, each of the Quad Cities grew around specific immigrant populations prone to settling amid family, friends and familiar looking and sounding folks from their native European homelands.

 

Swedes, for instance, made their homes mainly in Rock Island and Moline. Belgians settled, by and large, in neighborhoods consisting of their compatriots in Moline and East Moline.

 

From its inception, Davenport was a popular place for German immigrants to settle, and a place where industrious entrepreneurs came to build all manner of businesses. Some such enterprises supported farm industry giants across the river, Deere & Company, Farmall and International Harvester. Others served the commercial needs of a growing bi-state population.

 

As illustrated by the lawyers, bankers, producers and sellers of lumber and doors, processors of grain, and builders of trains who comprised the original DCC board of governors, many of Davenport’s most successful business leaders turned to the club in the country for relaxation and recreation as the 20s began to roar.

 

In short order, DCC’s membership would include the Franks of Frank Foundries Corp.; the Von Maurs of Petersen-Harned-Von Maur department stores; the Blochs of Midwest Machine, Tool and Supply Co.; the Schmidts of the Crescent Macaroni and Cracker Co.; and the Bettendorfs of the Bettendorf Metal Wheel Company.

 

At the club on the bluff, magnificent memories were manufactured by those and countless other families.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DCC’s Earliest Pairings

 

Although at its inception, the club featured horse stables and riding trails, as well as organized activities in water sports, horseshoes, tennis, and trap-shooting, the main attraction was golf.

 

DCC’s founding members were hardly alone in embracing the game in the earliest years of the 20th Century, when Americans with means built and joined golf-centered clubs at a rapid pace.

 

The number of clubs built around golf in the United States grew from 1,000 in 1915 to 5,500 by 1927, according to a 1998 article published in the Journal of Architectural Planning and Research.

 

Hugo Schmidt and his brother Carl already were devotees of the game and established members of Arsenal Country Club when Hugo’s son Dick was born in July of 1923.

 

Davenport Country Club was birthed seven months later. And, on a quiet Saturday afternoon mere months before his December 2022 death, Dick Schmidt sat in the home on the far west end of Davenport where he was born and lived virtually all of his life, and recounted in vivid detail his near century-long association with the club.

 

“My folks joined a couple of years after it started,” he began. “They didn’t join right away. My dad and my uncle always played the Arsenal. Eventually, we belonged to both, and I took lessons from Tom McQuarry at the Arsenal and Tom Cunningham, the old Scotsman, at DCC.

 

“A lot of people at that time had memberships in both clubs. Especially the people who worked and had businesses downtown. The Arsenal was an easy hop over the bridge, to play golf and eat lunch or something.”

 

Although the Schmidt family’s country estate was located a full 22 miles from DCC, Dick Schmidt found the club in the eastern end of Scott County the more kid-friendly option in his youth. And so he made the harder hop to DCC— covering the distance by bus, by train, and, frequently, by thumb.

 

“I would hitch hike and join a bunch of guys who were from the east end,” he said. “We’d play golf and I could always get a ride back into town from somebody. My dad would be working in town and I’d catch him and get home again.

 

“An old house that a banker had was empty in those early years and (DCC’s second pro) Tom Cunningham had a son, Gordon, who used to sleep overnight in a cot down there. I’d stay down there lots of times, and be at the club bright and early in the morning during the summer.”

 

The club in the country would become fundamentally important in Dick’s long and eventful life.

 

“I was a little kid, probably 5, 6, or 7 years old,” he said of his first memories of DCC. “I had three sisters that were two years apart. The lady that became my wife claims she saw me and made up her mind she was going to marry me. That’s her story. She kidded that I was playing dolls with my sisters when she first met me.”

 

That woman was Mary Ann Schulz, daughter of the resilient Reinhardt, and author of a remarkable life story in her own right.

 

The future Mrs. Schmidt literally could fly before she could drive and virtually swam before she walked. She was the first female lifeguard at the DCC pool and earned her pilot’s license while attending Marycrest College. The former actually was owed to the latter.

 

“She didn’t know how to drive but she struck a deal with her father that if she went to Marycrest instead of the University of Iowa, she would get a pilot’s license,” daughter Kathy recalled. “So, she had a pilot’s license before Dad taught her to drive.”

 

Some years later, Mary Ann would become one of the first airline hostesses for TWA, while Dick ran the family’s Crescent Macaroni and Cracker Co., until it was sold to a Chicago conglomerate. He then brought his business savvy to his father-in-law’s Lunex Corp.

 

Like many in their insular community — where friendships were formed at Davenport High School, the Outing Club, the Arsenal, and DCC — the future Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt were familiar and friendly growing up, but the coupling Mary Ann saw coming as a child didn’t happen until years later.

 

“I never had a date with her until I was in the Navy and came home one weekend on leave,” Dick remembered. “I ran into her on a street corner in downtown Davenport. I hadn’t seen her in four years or so. We went to a movie that night and that was the end of it.”

 

More accurately, it was the beginning of loving and lasting relationship that included 64 years of marriage and which began years before at the club in the country.

 

Friendships and More

 

The Schmidts’ coupling hardly was the only lasting relationship whose roots extend to the club on the bluff.

 

In August 2023, Jane and George Vieth celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary. Although the former Jane Bettendorf ultimately selected George from among several would-be high school suitors who partied in the pool room of her grandparents’ home overlooking the town that took the family name, their earliest interactions also took place at the Country Club.

 

Today, that pool room is a classroom at Rivermont Collegiate, and the Veiths make their home just a strong 7-iron from the fourth green at Crow Valley, the club they’ve called home for more than 50 years.

 

Yet, they were among many who learned to love the game at DCC.

 

In October of 2023, Nancy and Chuck Von Maur celebrated their 66th anniversary. That relationship also was formed, in part, at the club just up the road from Nancy’s childhood home.

 

Like many early DCC members, Chuck Von Maur's family lived at that time in the McClellan Heights section of Davenport. That was near to where Chuck’s grandfather Charles had set up shop with partner Rolland Harned in a 20-by-50-feet storefront at the corner of Davenport's Second and Main after traveling from the East Coast to the Midwest in 1872.

 

“I never knew how they got here and why they stopped in Davenport,” Chuck said many years later. “Except there were a lot of Germans here already and he thought there’d be opportunity.”

 

There was opportunity aplenty, and, after purchasing JHC Petersen and Sons in 1916, the family would grow Petersen-Harned-and-Von Maur into a chain consisting today of 37 stores across 15 states.

 

Chuck’s father, Richard Sr., brought his bride, Elsie, east from Philadelphia in 1926, and soon afterward, the entire Von Maur family, including uncles James and Cable, became part of the fabric of Davenport Country Club.

 

Elsie vied more than once for the women’s championship at DCC, and was the most avid golfer in Chuck’s immediate family. But a cousin, Joe Von Maur, turned his even more fervent obsession with golf into multiple club championships at both DCC and the Arsenal. In 1937, he won the Iowa State Amateur while a collegian at St. Ambrose College.

 

Nancy and Chuck Von Maur make their home today in a quaint and quiet country estate above what had been Valley City. It is close to the Country Club but not as close as was Nancy’s childhood home off Valley Drive.

 

Although the foundry founded by Harry J. Frank in 1898 was located on Davenport’s west end, the George Frank family made its home at 447 East Valley Road throughout Nancy’s formative years, and her longest-lasting memories and friendships were made at the club.

 

Among the former Nancy Frank’s earliest DCC memories are morning swims in the pool where Mary Ann Schulz stood guard.

 

“I don’t remember so much the golf course because I didn’t take lessons until I was a teenager, but I remember learning to swim there,” she said. “The pool was full of grass and stuff. It was not well maintained. We’d run off the hills with grass on our feet and jump into the pool. We would play Cut the Corner, Tag, and Pom-Pom Pull-Away.

 

“For many years, I would get up at 6:30 and swim for a half hour,” she recalled. “I’d drive up there in my bathing suit. Get in the car, no shoes, drive up and swim, and come home.

 

“We would play in those creek beds at 16 and 17 and they’d be yelling, ‘You kids get out of there.’ They didn’t like the girls to go in the ladies locker room, and they had a woman in there to keep everybody out. But we’d go in there and hang out. It was wonderful and it was just fun.”

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Horse Play at DCC

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The fun wasn’t limited to the youngest members.

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In the club’s earliest years, the stable across the street and the riding trails surrounding the golf course were central to horse-play among the adults.

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“My dad was part of a group of businessmen who would come out after work,” Nancy recalled. “They’d change clothes out in the yard, put on their riding pants and ride their horses around the golf course. And then come down to my dad’s property, about mile down from the country club.

 

“He wasn’t living there but he had a little bier stub on his property. One fellow would fix a dinner for the guys. They had no refrigeration. They had a fireplace. Book cases, beer steins, beer tables where you could put your tankards into these holes. Captain’s chairs. They’d go down there and have an evening of it.

 

“One night, one of the fellows got a little over happy, did something wrong and threw something into the fireplace and the whole thing burned down. They joined together at the country club, kept their horses at the stable and they would ride the course and board their horses there.”

 

Those earliest memories are part of the lore and allure of Davenport Country Club, and the relationships and friendships formed across a century neatly tie the past to the present.

 

“A lot of friendships were formed at DCC,” Nancy Von Maur said. “Yes they were. Old-time families. We’d take trips, families together, and people couldn’t believe we had all known each other for 50, 60, 70 years.

 

“There’s something about this community. Isn’t that funny? All grew up here. All played golf. That’s unusual. Just families. Old relationships. The young people grew up, went away to college. East or West Coast, came back, married, went into family businesses. Lumber. Law. Retail. Medicine. Manufacturing. They came back and stayed in this community.”