How Charles Hugh Alison happened to make his way along Valley Drive to the site of the newly incorporated Davenport Country Club in the spring of 1924 is a tale that seems lost to time.

 

Some assumptions, however, can be made.

 

It seems reasonable, for instance, to assume the more-established Thomas Bendelow received consideration for charting the course. The site was chosen, after all, with his enthusiastic approval. And, while his prolific resume included courses across the United States, Bendelow was particularly influential in the growth of golf in Iowa over the first quarter of the 20th Century.

 

Several of the best-known courses in the Hawkeye State first came to life through Bendlow’s pen. Per Geoffrey S. Cornish and  Ronald E. Whitten’s “Architects of Golf,” these include: Cedar Rapids Country Club, Fort Dodge Country Club, Clinton Country Club, Waveland in Des Moines, Geneva in Muscatine, and Sunnyside in Waterloo. Starting with Hyperion Fields in Johnston in 1901 and ending with Dubuque Golf and Country Club in 1923, the native Scotsman laid out the first iterations of 17 Iowa courses in all.

 

It is possible Bendelow was too busy in 1924 to take on the blank canvas on the bluff. Medinah 1, 2 and 3 were under his charge in the mid-1920s, after all, and those are only three of more than 60 courses he is credited with designing in neighboring Illinois alone.

 

Busy? That’s an understatement.

 

With courses covering 30 states and five Canadian provinces to his name, Bendelow came to be known as the Johnny Appleseed of American Golf in the first third of the 20th Century. That wasn’t always meant as a compliment. A great many of his early efforts were hastily staked nine-hole layouts left for members to construct. And a large number of those grew better in the care of more diligent designers who significantly expanded on his work. Cedar Rapids CC, for instance, is widely celebrated today as a Donald Ross course, with Bendelow’s formative contribution scarcely mentioned.

 

Bendelow’s resume fills more than four small-print columns in the Cornish-Whitten book, and includes a handful of well-regarded early classics author Anthony Gholz believes got his full attention. Yet, he may have spread even more seeds than the 400-plus courses those authors cite. One golf website rounds up his total to 600. Another leads with 800.

 

In the aggregate, quantity over quality may best describe his contributions.

 

With 105 courses in 19 countries on his ledger, meanwhile, Alison was no lolly gagger. His record in “Architects of Golf” includes only 25 credited solo efforts, but, as previously noted, Alison’s reputation as “the best sidekick in golf architecture history” is misleading.

 

Gholz is a Michigan-based architect who discovered late in life that a layout he considered “rinky-dink” when he played his high school golf there actually was a lost remnant of an early Alison effort.

 

Gholz said his hometown Port Huron Golf Club on the banks of Lake Huron in northern Michigan improved mightily following a reclamation project that brought it back to Alison’s original vision.

 

As a result, Gholz very quickly became a Colt-Alison aficionado.

 

His careful research into what he describes as the world’s “first golf course architecture firm” led him to author “Colt and Alison in North America,” published in 2018.

 

“My research claims 44 courses in North America by or renovated by Colt and Alison, from 1911 in Toronto and Detroit and 1936 in Trinidad and Tobago,” he said. “Of these, 33 are still in existence. Colt had nothing to do with the post-World War I courses in North America.”

 

Gholz and Whitten are in agreement on the last point.

 

“Most of the Colt-Alison work in the United States is actually Alison’s,” Whitten asserted. “The courses say Colt and Alison on them. But while Colt was the lead partner of the firm, he made rare trips to the United States.”

 

Three, actually, according to Gholz’s search of ship manifests and newspaper clippings. Those came in 1911, 1913 and 1914.

 

The Colt-Alison brand was formidable, however, and, certainly, Colt more than carried his weight in their native United Kingdom. The partnership was entrusted with redesigning three already-historic courses during the Roaring 20’s, and each remain in the Open Championship rota more than a century beyond. And those renovations of Muirfield, Royal St. Georges, and Royal Lytham and St. Annes would have been the work of Colt and other associates because they were completed while Alison was working in the United States and Japan.

 

Which also means the vast majority of North American courses credited to Colt and Alison were the Captain’s work, and proof that Alison was far more than a sidekick.

 

Gholz said Alison’s first work on the continent took place in Canada, first in Toronto and then in Hamilton. He settled near Detroit under the patronage of John Sweeney, founder of the Country Club of Detroit and Lochmoor Club.

 

In the fall of 1920, Alison opened a Colt-Alison shop in the Motor City, and, Gholz noted, “1921 was a big year, as Alison was at Port Huron, Pine Valley, Briarwood, Plum Hollow, Chevy Chase, Grand’mere, Toronto, Kirkland, Burning Tree, Canoe Brook South and Westwood.”

 

Eventually, he ventured west to Chicago. Knollwood Country Club in 1923 was followed by North Shore and Bob O’Link in 1924, the fateful year Captain C.H. Alison was commissioned to design another club a few hours further west of the Windy City.

 

Davenport Country Club would join a list of Alison designs that have grown in stature as the decades passed. Nine of the 33 courses credited in to the Colt-Alison partnership between 1920 and 1930 were included in Golfweek’s 2021 listing of the Top 200 Classic U.S. Courses Built Before 1960.

 

Among those, only top-ranked Pine Valley and No. 46 Milwaukee Country Club were held in higher esteem than the old soul on the Mississippi River bluff.

 

So how did Charles Hugh Alison happen to make his way along Valley Drive early and often in 1924?

 

The only sensible assumption is he was the best man for the job.

 

A Classic Comes to Life

 

Fun though it may be to imagine Alison and Reinhardt Schulz creating DCC together, one hole and one bottle of rye at a time, Whitten doubts that was the case.

 

“There were lots of stories about A.W. Tillinghast and Alistair MacKenzie opening a flask in the middle of the afternoon as they were watching the progress of a course being built, but I hadn’t heard that of Alison” he said. “He didn’t have that reputation.”

 

The evidence also runs counter to the notion Alison spent months or even weeks at a time at DCC. According to his resume in “Architects of Golf,” Alison had at least eight courses in various stages of progress in 1924.

 

“It’s a lot more romantic to say the architect stayed there the whole time but I doubt Alison would spend six months in Davenport, Iowa, with other projects going on,” Whitten said. “These architects would prepare plans and try to find someone who would be onsite to implement those plans.

 

“Again, when you look at Alison’s travels, he didn’t stay on one project to completion. He was always visiting another job. When you think about the travel they had to do, most of it by train or automobile or by ship crossing the Atlantic or Pacific, they couldn’t afford to do just one project at a time. They had to keep juggling all these plates on their respective posts.”

 

Given Schulz’s early role as DCC’s grounds superintendent, Whitten doesn’t doubt he participated in the buildout.

 

Yet, Schulz wouldn’t have been alone. A crew familiar to Alison likely was engaged in building the design, working off an Alison-created blueprint, a replica of which has a home today at the USGA's Golf House in New Jersey. Locals may have helped as well.

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“Good question,” Whitten said of who may have overseen the build. “He had construction superintendents. One was named Joe Mayo and there actually were a couple of guys with that level of name in the business at the time.

 

“There was Lynn Lavis, who did (Alison’s) Michigan stuff and probably some Chicago stuff, too,” Whitten said. “There were a couple of contracting firms in the business at that time. Lewis and Valentine, and Carter Seeds had a construction branch. But there weren’t as many Wadsworths or Landscapes Unlimited as there are today.”

 

Alison also was no Pete Dye, creating courses with a signature look and style

 

“I’m a firm believer that he, like a lot of architects, was site-specific,” Whitten explained. “The stuff he did around Chicago is all pretty flatland stuff. Knollwood. Bob O’ Link. But then you go to some place like Kirtland in Ohio, and it’s a rugged piece of terrain like Davenport is. And yet he was just as adept.”

 

DCC’s large bunkers and greens are a feature common to other Alison designs, but, given the available equipment, those were common features of many courses of the era, Whitten said.

 

“It was the nature of the beast of what they were building,” he said. “Working with a steam shovel bucket, you aren’t going to do bunkers that are intricate and tiny. Plus, it was cut and till. They’d dig out a bunker and then pile the soil at the green to build a green pad. So in a lot of cases, you had to have big bunkers.”

 

Still, Whitten allowed, “I would say that a lot of Alison courses I’ve seen over the years do have big bunkers.

 

A Blended Beauty

 

Having seen DCC only after several major revisions —  particularly the most recent Forse Golf Design, Inc., effort that hued most closely to Alison’s original blueprint — Whitten said he’s hard-pressed to call the golf course a time-tested Alison classic.

 

He just knows it is a great golf course whose fundamental character was shaped by one of the great architects of his time.

 

“There are so many holes that have been altered I’m not sure which holes are really Alison originals any more,” Whitten said.

 

A few things are certain. The first and 18th holes are completely different from what the architect mapped, each created brand new during a 2000 renovation by Lohman Golf Designs. In order to create the existing practice range, the opening hole was moved entirely at that time — and to the lasting chagrin of more than a few veteran members — from the up-and-over-the-hill, drivable par-4 that Alison drew up.

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The finishing hole? Well, that 180-degree, up-the-hill-to-the-swimming-pool original hole was reimagined by Lohman to something much like the creek-crossing, in-the-shadow-of-the-bridge hole that exists today. And that’s because the original, frankly, wasn’t a great hole by any modern standard.

 

In fairness, Mike Rock, a former longtime DCC member, takes great exception with the last sentence.

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Grandson of early member Dr. John Emmert Rock, Rock dug into the club’s history some years ago, and, with Whitten’s assistance, happened across some things Alison wrote about his work at DCC.

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“Our old 18 and our old first hole were right out of his gameplan and both of those have ceased to exist,” said Rock, who became a solid junior stick under the tutelage of Pete Pelcher in the 1960s. “He said in his articles the first hole should be an easy hole to allow you to warm up. The final hole of golf should be a matter of strategy.

 

“When I was a kid, you couldn’t cut the corner at 18 with the equipment as it was. But on the far side of the fairway was a flat spot, 15 feet by 15 feet. That’s where he wanted you to be. And that opened up the shot to the green, which is not unlike what McKenzie did at Augusta. He’s telling you don’t ever be above the pin.”

 

Both of those asks — hitting a 15-by-15-foot piece of flat ground on the far-side of steeply sloping fairway and then leaving yourself a makable putt on a green that sloped even more steeply back to front — were much more easily said than done.

 

And Kathy Schmidt said the there-at-the-start Reinhardt Schulz claimed that dastardly green was a matter of expediency, rather than strategy.

 

“Esther Christie, a paralegal for her attorney-husband Max, interviewed Grandpa,” she said. “Grandpa told her when he sat upstairs and watched golfers hit up to 18th hole, he was reminded that (green) was a mistake. It was supposed to have been three different putting levels on the green. But by the time they got to No. 18, they were anxious to be done with it.”

 

From the vantage point of 100 years, that may have been one of the few corners Charles Hugh Alison cut.

 

Architectural experts such as Whitten rave about the creative routing the Captain used to carry golfers on an adventure around the old-souled grounds of DCC.

 

And classic holes such as the par-4 7th and signature cliffside 16th were, and remain, examples of a gifted architect taking the canvas nature provided and using it to create an artful challenge.

 

Sam Snead, the mid-20th-Century golf great whose swing was downright artful itself, might have disagreed, per No. 16. Snead was leading through 68 holes in his bid for a third straight Western Open title in 1951 when he dumped a 1-iron into Spencer Creek and finished third behind Marty Furgol.

 

Since that fateful Sunday, DCC’s 16th has carried the poetic designation of “Hole of Grief.” But it was a famously great golf hole at inception.

 

“I remember 16 being on a Golfdom magazine cover in the early 30s, and it was pretty much the hole it is today,” Whitten said. “I’d be hard-pressed to say that’s a typical Alison hole. Alison, like Tillinghast, was a lot  more site specific than somebody like Donald Ross. You have to discover a hole like that.”

 

One thing of which Whitten is certain: Alison didn’t drive down the hill on Valley Drive for the last time with significantly more in his pocket than the $1,000 Snead earned with a third-place finish 27 years later.

 

“Most of those guys didn’t give up their days jobs,” he said of the great architects of the time. “Donald Ross was the general manager of Pinehurst all those years. He was on the payroll. Tillinghast always was an editor and writer and he died a pauper. McKenzie? It’s pretty well documented that he died a pauper. Augusta National never paid him his $3,000 for his design. Alison was a full-time architect but I don’t know how wealthy he was.”

 

Whatever amount of currency the Captain may have collected as the right man to design Davenport Country Club, the surest assumption a century hence is that DCC members got more than their money’s worth.