Magnolia Springs had one of the first golf courses

At the Magnolia Springs Hotel just south of Governors Creek and on the bank of the St. Johns River was Clay County’s biggest and best of the 1800s tourist hotels. Built in 1881, Bostonian Isaac Crufts’ hostelry had all the latest bells and whistles including one of the nation’s earliest nine-hole golf courses.

The hotel’s extensive brochure touted it as “probably the best golf course in Florida” and claimed it “closely resembled the best Scottish links”. The course was approximately a mile and a half long and was supervised by professional golfer and instructor Philip H. Honeyman.

The sport of golf was just catching on in the United States but the game had been around since at least the middle 1400s because it was then that James II of Scotland banned both golf and football. It seems they were interfering with archery practice necessary to defend the realm. The guests at Magnolia were mightily enthusiastic about the sport too.

They teed off swinging hickory shafted clubs with heads of iron or other various exotic woods. These were a big improve- ment over the crooks that bored shepherds near St. Andrews in Scotland are supposed to have used to hit rocks into rabbit holes and start the whole thing.

The Sears and Roebuck catalog sold gutta percha balls, manufactured from the hardened gum of a tree in Malaya, for $3.50 a dozen. Putters, mashy and niblick clubs and lofting irons were $1.25 each from the catalog giants in the 1800s.

Golfers at the Magnolia Resort Hotel faced the challenge of rolling terrain and fairways that wouldn’t pass for roughs these days. There was more than likely no call for sand traps as the whole course was more sand than grass. The main hazard to overcome was the railroad track which split the course with the _rst two holes and the last three holes on the east side tracks and the middle four holes on the west side. The hotel’s charming Victorian train station for guests arriving by rail was perched right in the middle of the course. Play stopped when the train pulled into the station and players waited while baggage and new arrivals were loaded onto the hotel’s mule drawn railcar for the short trip through the pine woods to the hotel.

Golf has changed a lot since those days. Balls go farther and last longer, the assortment of clubs is endless, and courses are lush and dif_culty is intentionally designed. But in the old days you could buy all the clubs and balls you needed for under $10 and at the Magnolia Hotel they might let you drive the mule cart on the way back to the hotel.

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