Begun in 1899 with 9-holes on the south side of town, the Port Huron (Michigan) Golf Club moved to the Lake Huron shore in 1912. Tom Bendelow, America’s most prolific architect, designed the first 9-holes, at 3,290 yards the longest in Michigan. Captain Charles Hugh Alison, of the famed English firm of Colt & Alison, came to Detroit in 1920 to oversee their new American headquarters. Within weeks of his arrival he was in Port Huron to route a new 18-hole course over the ancient sand ridges. He returned in 1921 to design the course’s architectural features. The C&A firm was also on site during the mid and late twenties to design new greens and other course features, the last coming in 1928. After WWII the county built a road through Alison’s first and eighteenth holes, the first of several blows to the course. However, in 2001 the club retained David Pandel Savic to renovate the greens, returning them to their Golden Age roots. Recent tree removal and a new master plan by Savic in 2014 point to a brighter future for this sterling example of Alison’s use of the site’s natural sand ridges to form a timeless necklace of fairways and greens “along the shores of Lake Huron.”
This history of a classic Golden Age course, designed by one of the international giants of the architectural world, is told using original Alison drawings, C&A drawings and letters, aerial photos, scorecards and club files dating back to 1908, period news articles, and publications from the turn of the last century. The book starts with a discussion of the founders of the club and the original two courses on Griswold Street, and ends with a discussion of the course today and the recently completed master plan. In between, photos and drawings of the course and surrounding lakeshore make this early twentieth century Lake Huron beach resort area come alive.