illy Game Not Possibly Last Golf Comes to Minnesota An excerpt from From Fields to Fairways, which is coming from the University of Minnesota Press in March By Rick Shefchik note: Rick new book chronicles the origins of golf in Minnesota. This is the in a series of installments of From Fields to Fairways that we will share with our readers. arly in the summer of 1893, a disgruntled young St. Paul Dispatch reporter wandered into William insurance looking for society gossip. He walked out with a misunderstanding that would lead to the creation of golf course. Thirty-seven years later, in 1930, last survivor among the young men who had founded St. Town Country about the origins of the club, which started as a year-round offshoot of a St. Paul Winter Carnival club called the Nushkas. After moving from its tiny clubhouse on Lake Como to a splendid new Cass Gilbertdesigned clubhouse on Marshall Avenue in 1890, the club had been seeking a reason for its continued existence. Enter Mr. Hawkes. He had been assigned to a gossip www.mngolf.org column with society task he loathed. Peet suggested Hawkes write a story about the game of golf, a Scottish import that was just beginning to capture the imagination of outdoor enthusiasts on the East Coast. Instead, Hawkes returned to his and wrote that Peet intended to bring the game to the Town Country Club. That erroneous newspaper item enticed a Scottish immigrant and locomotive machinist named George McCree to visit the following day and offer to help him start a course. toyed with the idea for a day or two and took McCree out to the Country Club with my lawn mower in the back of my runabout and, with the assistance of the yard man, we cut the grass on the Peet wrote. began playing on our present course in 1893 and have played on the same ground continuously ever McCree oversaw the layout of a course over pasture land owned by neighboring farmer Barton Eberhardt. His son, John A. McCree, who accompanied his father and Peet, told the Chicago Tribune in 1969 about the experience Directory 2012 MINNESOTAGOLFER Directory 2011 MINNESOTAGOLFER