Hunter History

Hunter Men’s Golf Club

George Hunter Memorial Golf Course - Address: 688 Westfield Road, Meriden, CT 06450 - Pro Shop: 203-634-3366

Highland Country Club of Meriden

Atkins Street, Middletown CT

Closed in 1940. Pine Trees were planted in every fairway of the old course.

Front of 1st Tee View from 1st Tee Caddy Shack Corner Post?

Elevated 10th Tee Aerial Photo of Former Highland GC 11th Green

13th Green 14th Greenside Bunker Site of old Clubhouse

BRADLEY PARK LINKS CLUBHOUSE (Today)

Golf History Page

for Meriden & the Surrounding Area

Record Journal Article 06/22/2008

A Green History of the Silver City

By: Jeffrey Kurz, Record-Journal staff

MERIDEN - Local historian Dan W. DeLuca stood at the far end of the James T. Kay Mechanical Contractors parking lot the other day and eyed an imaginary tee shot.

"A lot of people don't realize that this is where the beginning of golf was in Meriden," he said.

That "beginning" was on June 3, 1899, a Saturday. The Meriden Daily Journal reported that several matches were played that day "and excellent scores made." The brief article mentions that a number of ladies played and that "it is probable that the links will be occupied by many players every afternoon from now on."

The first course in Meriden, the North Colony Street Links, was short-lived, lasting only 10 months. The city has been home to four other golf courses in the nearly 110 years since.

That assessment is only a slight stretch, because the Highland Country Club of Meriden, which operated from 1910 to 1940, was located over the border in Middletown. But Meriden duffers considered it their own.

Such quibbles aside, it would be hard to argue against Meriden's enduring passion for golf. Just last year, there were 34,000 rounds of golf played at the city's sole remaining links, the Hunter Golf Club, or "muni," as it's still, often affectionately, called.

The city's course, an emerald gem amid the trap rock ridges, consistently ranks among Connecticut Magazine's top 10 public links in the state.

"We're pretty proud of that fact," said Tex Kane, Hunter's PGA professional.

The course is also, incidentally, in prime condition this season, said Ryan Kane, a sales associate in the pro shop who is Tex Kane's son.

"Best shape we've been in in a while," noted Ryan Kane.

Initially, golf was a pastime for the city's elite, but that has changed with the times.

"Now, definitely, Hunter is a blue-collar, public golf course," said Tex Kane.

In the years since play began in Meriden, the game of mashies and niblicks has given way to titanium-infused and weight-customized drivers and obsession with MOI, or moment of inertia, which enlists the assistance of the laws of physics in club design. Players are making use of such scientific and technical marvels today during the culminating round at the Travelers Championship in Cromwell.

"It's not that long ago," said DeLuca, of golf's start in Meriden. "And think of what golfing has come to today."

The professional of today would require no more than a mashie, or 5 iron, to drive the green of the most distant hole of the 1899 course, where the two longest holes measured 200 yards.

North Colony Links

Length, or lack of it, proved to be among the most influential reasons the course did not last long. Players were getting better at the game quickly, and the North Colony Street Links had plans to keep up with their progress and lengthen holes until room ran out.

DeLuca spent a moment at the spot where plans to rearrange the course placed the 6th tee at a location requiring a shot across the railroad tracks. "I guess you had to wait until the train went by," he said.

Today, what was for a moment in time a golf course is now mostly a farm. Or The Farm, where, on about 5 ½ acres, the Staschke family grows tomatoes, squash, green beans, peppers, blueberries, raspberries and strawberries.

Ken Staschke reports that years of tilling have uncovered little evidence, and no lost balls, from the era. A collection of balls sits by the entrance to the farmhouse, but those are the wayward remains of practice sessions by some duffer from the condominium complex nearby.

"Every year I plow I find something," Staschke said. Those finds have included a brass bridle head and oxen shoes.

Staschke has also found little white rings that have the look of a golf ball at a distance. DeLuca thinks they are parts of electric insulators that likely came from the long-since-dismantled course clubhouse.

Bradley Park, Highland

A decade ago, the Rev. Mark Jette, a golfing enthusiast, went looking for the Bradley Park Links, which was in operation from 1900 to 1909, when he found out the North Colony Street course was actually the city's first. The discovery turned into a research project, which led to a book chronicling a "Century of Golf in Meriden: 1898-1999."

Jette, a longtime pastor of St. Joseph Church, on West Main Street, has been pastor at St. Lawrence Parish, in West Haven, for the last several years. But he still returns to Meriden each week to play a round at Hunter. The 61-year-old priest shoots in the 80s, which any golfer will tell you is respectable, and sometimes in the 70s, "but not all that often," he said.

Jette said he took about four years to go through microfilm and other research for the self-published book. "It became a hobby over the years," he said. As much as possible, Jette also interviewed people who had played on the old courses.

Unlike the North Colony Street Links, the Highland Country Club is a place where one can still stumble upon golf-related stuff, he said.

"You can still find tees," said Jette. "That was quite the country club for many years. It was one of the well-respected country clubs in New England before the Depression."

In his book, Jette reports that talk about building a Meriden golf links started as early as August 1897. It's a measure of the enthusiasm for the project that it took only a couple of years to make the plan a reality.

With the opening of the links along North Colony came an influx of golf-related newspaper advertising. One ad promised that a rub-down with Omega Oil would relieve the stiffness from a day of slogging around on the course.

A 1901 "Golf!" ad for E.T. Sills, at 18 West Main St., noted the influx of Spaulding and Vardon "drivers, brassies, cleeks, mashies, putters, etc." along with a variety of golf balls.

Today's golfer employs hybrids, forgiveness and game-improvement clubs. For yesterday's golfer, a mashie was a 5 iron, a niblick a 9 iron, a brassie a 2 wood. The cleek was a one iron, though the term also referred to a 4 wood.

Meriden's first course had its fair share of idiosyncrasies as well, as Jette notes:

"Local rules were as follows: When a ball is driven onto the railroad track, the potato field, or the stone quarry, it is to be taken back to its original position with loss of distance and stroke. When a ball lies too close to a wall, it may be moved one iron stick's length without penalty. When a ball on a fairway cannot be hit without danger of breaking a golf stick on a stone, the ball may be dropped over the player's head without penalty. The greens committee also decided to place stakes on the links to mark each 50 yards."

While the committee charged with developing Meriden's course was working on building a new clubhouse and designing a longer, more challenging layout, problems with the lease of the land arose. A friendlier lease was arranged with the William Bradley estate, and golf in Meriden moved across the city, to the Bradley Park Links, where play began in 1900 and lasted nearly a decade.

The original clubhouse, a mansion near the corner of West Main Street and Bradley Avenue, is now a private home.

"A little daft ..."

The other major course for Meriden was the Pleasant View Course, where play started in 1932 and continued until 1979. It was a 9-hole course on Paddock Avenue.

Meriden's municipal course opened in 1929. In the mid-1960s, the "muni" was named for George Hunter, who was born in Scotland and moved to Meriden in 1929 to become its first golf pro.

As the Daily Journal noted in 1927, "year by year, golf grows more and more popular. People in all walks of life have taken it up. At one time it was considered a rich man's game."

At the start of golf in Meriden, an 1899 editorial in the Morning Record, which Jette quotes in his book, had a prescient outlook on the situation:

"Meriden is going the way of all the earth. It is a little daft on the subject of golf, that is, a certain portion of the community that has contracted the disease, and the rest would be glad to be convalescent if they only had the opportunity. We're glad Meriden has been stricken. It is a good sign."