Image: Golfers at the Grande Prairie [Richmond Hill] Golf course on July 16, 1960. (SPRA 2005.061.05.5)
As the grass gets greener, days get longer, and the sun gets warmer we know that many people are excited to be hitting the greens for a round of golf. The history of golf in the South Peace is visible through many records within the South Peace Regional Archives collection, but perhaps the most detailed account comes from the Grande Prairie Golf and Country Club Fonds (554). These records were donated by the Ladies of the Grande Prairie Golf and Country Club and contains, among other records, 17 impressive scrapbooks filled with news clippings about the Ladies tournaments and tournament winners, the Club’s fundraising and volunteering activities, as well as clippings from a golfing news column that appeared in the Grande Prairie Herald-Tribune.
Golf has been a tradition enjoyed by South Peace residents since the 1920s, although according to golfer R.H. Watcher (who was interviewed by historian Isabel Campbell in 1967), Grande Prairie’s first golf course was more weed than it was green. Watcher’s interview was featured in a news article written by Campbell and is now part of the Grande Prairie Golf and Country Club Fonds.
In this interview, Watcher recalled visiting the first golf course, where the weeds would grow so thick throughout the late spring and summer that he once “lost [his] golf bag among the goldenrod and yarrow and took a day to find it.” In 1929 the first formal golf course, the Richmond Hill Golf and Country Club, opened with 39 members who paid a fee of $25 each and a board of seven directors. The golf course was located on top of Richmond Hill and featured a clubhouse complete with a fieldstone fireplace. There are many photographs of this clubhouse featured in the SPRA collection.
As early as 1932, Richmond Hill Golf and Country Club was home to a Ladies Club (also referred to as the Ladies Association). Despite the presence of a Ladies Club, the Richmond Hill Golf and Country Club board of directors did not have any female members throughout the 1930s and 1940s, according to their records. In 1953, Mrs. W.L. Caldwell became the first woman to join the board, serving as the only female member until Mrs. Ina Fee joined her in 1956. The “Ladies of the Richmond Hill Golf and Country Club” were regularly covered in local newspapers, and many of these news stories were preserved by the Ladies Club in their scrapbooks.
By the mid-1960s the Richmond Hill Golf and Country Club board of directors began work on a new golf course and purchased 160 acres south-east of Grande Prairie (twice the size of the old course). The new course, named the Grande Prairie Golf and Country Club, opened in 1967 with a new clubhouse opening the following year. The Ladies Club was re-named the Ladies of the Grande Prairie Golf and Country Club following the opening of the new course. News coverage on the activities of the Ladies Club continued throughout the late 1960s onwards. Some interesting news clippings preserved in the Ladies Club scrapbooks include one 1969 news article announcing the first women-only tournament held at the Grande Prairie Golf and Country Club. A few years later in 1972, the Herald-Tribune announces the “first-ever commercial ladies golf league in the city” and highlights one team, the Honey Bees, who were participating in the league. The creation of a new tournament and commercial league for women-only provided new opportunities for greater amounts of women to participate in the sport and shows the increasing popularity of golf among women in the South Peace at this time. The Ladies Club scrapbooks documents the activities of the Ladies of Grande Prairie Golf and Country Club until the early 2000s. The scrapbooks provide a great insight into the growth of the sport throughout the South Peace, especially in regards to the strides women made to be included and accepted in the world of golf.
This article first appeared in the June 2021 issue of Telling Our Stories.