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Brassies, mashies and gutties were a strange sight in Roanoke in 1896.
Courtesy of the Virginia Room, Roanoke Public Libraries
The Roanoke Country Club and golf course in South Roanoke in 1905.
In 1896, the Sanderson family strolled over to the ballpark along the Roanoke River and took out their brassies, mashers and jiggers. Curious onlookers thought them strange with their shinny sticks.
The patriarch, R. P. C. Sanderson, had come to Roanoke to work for the Norfolk & Western Railway. A native of England, Sanderson still spoke with a British accent and possessed certain traits and mannerisms that bore the imprint of his European background. Playing an odd sport fit his public profile. No one had ever seen golf played in Roanoke, much less knew the point of it.
Sanderson, along with his wife, sister, son and two neighbor ladies were soon playing on a rudimentary course designed by Sanderson’s sister.
By 1899, Sanderson had moved his little course to a large cow pasture owned by the Crystal Spring Land Company in South Roanoke. The crude layout consisted of short, rough fairways and sand greens. Holes were created with buried tomato cans. Sanderson took it upon himself to offer lessons and instruction about the game. Crowds soon gathered regularly to watch and learn.
In 1924, Walter Carpenter remembered Sanderson’s early efforts to promote golf. “He explained to the curious that instead of a general scramble between two opposing sides to swat one ball across a goal line that each player used his own ball in an endeavor to entice it into some cup surreptitiously hidden in a pasture lot. The mysteries of the driver, brassies, mashie, jigger, niblick and putter were unfolded to an amazed and credulous audience. The curious looked and listened and got the bug.”
As the popularity of golf grew, Sanderson and others felt the need to form a small golf club. A year or so later and after much discussion, the golfers united with a local tennis club to form the Roanoke Country Club. John Reid, who was a nineteen-year-old member of the tennis club at the time, later recalled those efforts. “They gave me the job of taking around a subscription sheet to see how many members I could get.”
The club purchased a house adjacent to Sanderson’s course and converted it into the clubhouse. Located near the present-day South Roanoke fire station, the house was remodeled, wooden lockers installed and a wrap-around porch added. Sand tennis courts were constructed nearby, having been previously located along Franklin Road.
The golfers played with gutta-percha balls made of juice extracted from an evergreen tree in the Malay Archipelago. Called “gutties,” the balls were durable, similar to today’s plastic, but not made for distance. Interviewed in 1956, Reid said, “We’d think it was a good drive if a man could hit the ball half the distance they could get today. But you couldn’t tear the ball. Topping it would create only a scratch maybe. When it got dirty, you could repaint it.”
The Crystal Spring links were so short that golfers only needed three clubs — a driver, mid-iron and putter. The short fairways grew narrower as the land development company sold more house lots that encroached upon the course. Club members could not complain, as the course was on land being loaned to them by the land company. Who knew Roanokers would want homes “way out” in pasture land? Soon, the goal of playing became more about “missing the house” than making par. With decreasing links, the decision to move the club and course became quite clear when the clubhouse burned in 1907. The Roanoke Country Club moved to Northwest Roanoke soon thereafter.
The early days of golf in Roanoke proved fruitful to the promotion of the game. Soon after Sanderson pioneered the game here, he organized golf teams that competed against teams from other communities in Western Virginia, namely Lexington, Staunton and Charlottesville. But during its initial years in Roanoke, golf remained mostly an oddity.
By the mid-1950s, Reid was the last living charter member of the Roanoke Country Club and the only who could recall the early days of the game in Crystal Spring. Reid, a retired banker, was in his mid-80s at that time and still hitting the links once a week. He attributed golfing to his longevity. When Reid moved to Roanoke from Moundsville, WV, in the 1890s he remembered that young people played baseball and tennis.
“However, I had a lawyer friend who played golf and I kidded him about it until he got mad and challenged me to a match. Well, I played a round and haven’t stopped.” While much had changed with golf in Roanoke during his lifetime, one adjustment required reluctant acceptance on Reid’s part. “I don’t remember my reaction when I first saw a woman golfing, but it might have been, ‘they’re good to look at, but they clutter up the course.’” Never mind that of Roanoke’s pioneer golf family, the Sandersons, three of the five were women.
This spring as many take out a driver and tee up at one of several courses in the Roanoke Valley, they will not know that in 1896 Roanokers thought an Englishman and his family with their jiggers and mashies hitting a guttie were just plain crazy.
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