Question: This year marks the 35th year of the event that is represented in these two photos. Can you identify the event and the two presenters?
Last week’s answer: Last week’s photo showed the earlier clubhouse of the Seneca Golf Club. Located on the east side of Route 48 approximately two and a half miles south of the village line, the club was formally organized in 1922.
More than 20 years earlier, local golfers had formed an association and laid out a course on the Maple Road farm of Frank Van Ness. The location was easily accessible by both highway and trolley. The June 6, 1901, Gazette reported that the Seneca Golf Club had organized, officers were elected, committees were appointed and the membership fee was set at $5 for each gentleman. This fee included “the ladies of his family.”
Greens and tees were laid out by a Mr. Campbell, a “professional from Syracuse.” Tradition holds that the cups were tin cans inserted in the ground and that the Van Ness sheep were “nature’s groundskeepers.”
The sport grew in popularity, and in 1922 a group of six B’villians put up $1,000 each and purchased 50 acres of the Van Ness farm. The original stakeholders were Dr. Ed Robinson, Fred Robinson, Cecil Crego, Oscar Brown, Ned Marvin and Windsor Morris. Dues were $17.50 and the initiation fee was $50. Thirty members were enrolled.
The first board of directors included Cecil Crego, George Pulver, Edward Marvin, James H. Corbett, Jr., Robert Orvis, Oscar J. Brown, Leon Conklin, Arthur Tyler, James F. Gere, Jacob Amos and Dr. Earl Kratzer. The following July 4th, the club hosted its first tournament on the new nine-hole Maple Road links.
With its location on Maple Road (today known as State Fair Boulevard) and its position at trolley stop No. 14, the club was easily accessible. In 1926 membership was capped at 100 to “ensure that the course would not become overcrowded” and to “furnish good golfing for its members at all times.”
The depression dealt the club a severe blow. The initiation fee was dropped, but membership dropped as well. With only eight members, payroll was eliminated and all grounds and maintenance work was done by volunteers.
The organization was rescued in 1941 by Morris Machine Works, the backbone of Baldwinsville’s industrial community. Morris purchased the club, restored the grounds and facilities and promoted memberships and events. Twenty years later, Morris sold the revitalized club to the Route 48 Corp., a private group.
On Oct. 8, 1969, an arsonist reduced the clubhouse to ashes in an attempt to cover a burglary. Gone was the main structure with its barroom, dining room, locker rooms and sun porch. Some 20 sets of clubs and bags were lost, as well as more than 45 years of memorabilia from programs to photos and trophies.
Under the leadership of Bill Grygiel, the clubhouse was quickly rebuilt and the club opened for business the following spring. Today, almost 50 years later, the rolling fairways between the Seneca River and the old trolley route continue to call golfers to the links of the Seneca Golf Club.
While many readers submitted guesses for last week’s photo, only Carl Fletcher got it right: “As a kid I spent a lot of time helping my mom,” he wrote on the Messenger’s Facebook page. “She ran a restaurant there for the golfers.”
Contact Editor Sarah Hall at [email protected] or leave a message at 434-8889 ext. 310 with your guess by 5 p.m. Friday (please leave the information in the message; we are not generally able to return calls regarding History Mystery responses). If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo, your name and guess will appear in next week’s Messenger, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Museum at the Shacksboro Schoolhouse and the Baldwinsville Public Library.
