Photo courtesy of the Coastal Georgia Historical Society
The golf links at Windsor Park in Brunswick, circa 1925
Brunswick and the Golden Isles have long been known as a mecca for golfers, with local history of the game stretching back over 120 years. Members of the Jekyll Island Club registered with the United States Golf Association in 1894 and opened their first nine-hole course in 1898. The next local course was built in Brunswick, south of Gloucester Street in the neighborhood of Windsor Park.
In 1888, the newly-formed Brunswick Terminal and Railway Securities Company, financed by New York and Western capitalists and known locally as the Brunswick Company, acquired a large tract between the Marshes of Glynn and downtown Brunswick. The company had planned to develop Windsor Park as a “picturesque” winter retreat of residences for wealthy Northerners, but the project was delayed by financial setbacks in the 1890s.
Around the turn of the century, the company permitted the Brunswick Golf Association, later known as the Brunswick Golf Club, to build a nine-hole golf course within Windsor Park. The links course measured 2,550 yards and had sand greens. It was described in R.L. Polk’s 1914-1915 Brunswick City Guide as “one of the finest in the South” and had “an attractive club house with comfortable appointments.”
The situation changed in the mid-1920s when establishment of new industries led to an increase in population and a housing shortage. By 1926, the Brunswick Company had revived its plan to develop Windsor Park as a residential subdivision. They commissioned an official survey from local engineer Fernando J. Torras, who had recently completed the causeway to St. Simons Island, and three model homes were constructed to attract buyers. This caused a dilemma for the Golf Club. As stated in the November 16, 1926 edition of the Brunswick Pilot, “a large number of lots privately owned … are right in the middle of the golf course, and the erection of homes on one or two of them would so interfere with the course that further playing would be impossible.”
Though a syndicate representing the Golf Club owned twenty-six lots in the Park, a portion of the course was held by others who wanted to develop their property. In 1927, the club members abandoned the course and bought property north of the city, where they built the Brunswick Country Club in the early 1930s. The Country Club is still in operation today.
This month’s image from the Coastal Georgia Historical Society archives shows a postcard of the golf links at Windsor Park, circa 1925.
