A Golf Legend Comes to Mackinac Island

Wawashkamo Register dated June 29, 1919. Walter Hagen outlined in red box.

Wawashkamo Golf Club’s board of directors recently donated the club’s early Visitor’s Registers to Mackinac State Historic Parks. These leather-bound books, dating from 1900 and filled with the names and dates of golfers, provide a delightful glimpse into the history of the course and early 20^th century Mackinac Island. Thumbing through the first volume, we were thrilled to discover that Walter Hagen, one of the game’s most successful and popular golfers in the first half of the 20^th century, played the island course in the summer of 1919.

Wawashkamo, one of Michigan’s oldest golf courses, was designed in 1898 and

Wawashkamo Club House, ca. 1905.

constructed during the following spring and summer. The clubhouse was completed in July 1900 and Walter Dore, guest of fellow Chicagoan and club president Dr. L. L. McArthur, became the first signatory of the club register on August 29, 1900. Supported primarily by the island’s summer cottagers, play at Wawashkamo increased steadily during the first two decades of the 20^th century as the popularity of golf grew. Over time, the course attracted golfers from throughout the Midwest, including a group of business leaders from Detroit in the summer of 1919.

City of Detroit III at Mackinac Island.

On July 27, 1919 the steamship City of Detroit III, set sail from Detroit with more than 650 members of the Board of Commerce, a local businessmen’s organization. The annual “B. of C. Excursion” was headed for northern Michigan, including a stop at Mackinac Island. On board were company executives, manufactures, members of the press, and golfer Walter Hagen.

A native of Rochester, New York, Walter C. Hagen moved to Michigan in 1918 to become the first golf professional at Oakland Hills Country Club.  Hagen won his first U.S. Open championship four years earlier and his second on June 12, 1919 at Brae Burn Country Club in West Newton, Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Hagen participated in hundreds of exhibition matches around the country to help popularize the sport. By the time of the 1919 Board of Commerce summer cruise, Hagen was one of the country’s best known and most popular golfers.  Modern golf fans may be familiar with the portrayal of Hagen in the fictional golf match in 2000 movie The Legend of Bagger Vance.

Just 17 days after winning his second U.S. Open title, Hagen and more than two dozen

Walter Hagen, pictured at the U.S. Open Championship in 1919, which he won. Courtesy New York Public Library.

fellow Detroiters played the links at Wawashkamo. Joined by club president John L. Cochran, Sr., the Detroit group included George W. Cushing, advertising manager for the Hudson Motor Car Company, Walter Huetter of Michigan Electrotype and Stereotype Company, advertising executive Frank V. Martin, University of Michigan professor and consulting engineer F. N. Menefee, Max Stotter, president of Peninsular Smelting, Z. Himelhoch, department store owner, and Gordon C. King, general manager of the Crescent Pump Company. Also on board was correspondent Edgar Guest from the Detroit Free Press.  Guest had a forty-year media career as a syndicated columnist, radio show and television host, and prolific poet. Guest penned thousands of poems and was appointed Michigan’s Poet Laureate from 1952 until his death seven years later.

This was a whirlwind visit to Mackinac. The group arrived early Sunday morning and set sail for Detroit the same day.  Little is known of this historic round of golf.  No score card was kept and the Free Press simply reported that the “Wawashkamo Golf Club links…and the Mackinac Island Golf Club grounds east of the Grand Hotel were the scenes of exhibition games featuring Walter Hagen.”  However, the event is forever recorded under the date July 29, 1919 in the Wawashkamo Visitor’s Register and the names of Walter Hagen and his fellow golfers are now preserved and protected as part of the Mackinac State Historic Parks archival collection.