Tough, well-trapped, and cantankerous:
Knoxville’s Historic Holston Hills Golf Course
The site of this month’s Visit Knoxville Open is one of the most beautiful golf courses in the region, on the banks of the Holston River. Now almost a century old, Holston Hills is also one of the most historic courses in Tennessee.
Golf was catching on around the world in the 1890s when Knoxville’s first golf course, a nine-holer, emerged not far from Holston Hills, near what’s now Chilhowee Park. Knoxville’s first regulation 18-hole course, at Cherokee Country Club in 1907, brought Knoxville into the golfing world, but by 1920, serious golfers wished for something that was longer and tournament-ready. They found it at the old McDonald Farm at the new residential subdivision, Holston Hills.
It says something about Knoxville’s need for tournament-ready links that several golfers from Cherokee Country Club were on the committee to plan Holston Hills—including William Cary Ross, the founder of Cherokee, and Albert Baumann, Jr., the architect who designed Cherokee’s clubhouse. The members of Whittle Springs Golf Course, on the north side of town, were interested, too, and even merged with Holston Hills. They all wanted a course that was longer, cleaner, quieter, and more varied than what was available.
By most accounts, the golf course and the country club itself were the idea of a business investor formerly of Pennsylvania, Dwight Meigs, a graduate of both Yale and England’s Oxford University, and a serious golfer himself. It was not long after his arrival in Knoxville that the resourceful Meigs set about to plan a world-class golf course, suitable for tournaments. Meigs was personally acquainted with the most famous golf-course designer in America, Scottish immigrant Donald Ross.
Almost 20 years earlier, Ross (1872-1948) had designed the legendary Pinehurst #2 in North Carolina, considered one of the best courses in America. Visiting the former MacDonald Farm on the then-rural east side of town—the area was just beyond the end of the electric streetcar line—Ross made a surprising claim for the property. “There is not the slightest doubt that it will take its place as one of the finest courses in the country today,” Ross claimed in June, 1926, called his engineers, and went to work.
It was before the era of precision earth-moving equipment. Ross designed hundreds of courses in his career, some of which he never visited, but his relationship to Holston Hills seemed personal. By some accounts Ross personally supervised the mule-drawn “drag pan” grader on its circular patterns. Ross had certain distinctive ideas about golf. One was that a good course should present such diverse challenges that it would demand that a golfer use all of his or her clubs.
At the same time, Holston Hills was building its clubhouse, designed by Charles Barber, of the relatively new firm Barber & McMurry. He would soon be well-known for his signature work at the University of Tennessee campus, and for some landmark churches, but Holston Hills was one of his earlier designs.
It’s still a graceful building, but the golf course was what drew the most attention. As it was taking shape in early 1927, the Scottish genius seemed delighted with his creation. “You have an outstanding test of golf at Holston Hills,” Ross wrote. “There is not an uninteresting hole in the 18, and certainly no course in my designing offers more variety, flexibility, or natural beauty…. What I like most about your course is the fact that it is one of the hardest but fairest layouts to be found. The best players of the country will hold it in great respect…. It is a grand course, equal to anything the South can offer and, given proper finishing touches, equipment and maintenance, will soon be recognized nationally as a championship test of golf.”
The course was completed enough for trials by Aug. 1, 1927, when it opened for members to try. Holston Hills was longer than any other golf course in the Knoxville area, and by all accounts, better. The neighborhood that grew up around it was fully identified with the golf course. By the original business plan, membership in the golf course would come with a plot of land for a house.
It sounds as if the course was not fully ready for play until its grand opening in May 1928.
Of course, the timing was terrible. The stock-market crash of 1929 upended many Knoxvillians’ dreams of affluence and leisure, and membership in the club was not what was originally expected. The country club itself went through several sales and reorganizations. Meigs, the once-wealthy original planner of the complex who hired Ross, suffered other business reversals, went broke. Several Knoxville businessmen of that era were so distraught that they didn’t survive the shock. In 1930, Meigs committed suicide.
Through it all, Ross’s green golf course survived unscathed, though it seemed slow to emerge in the national consciousness. Repeatedly it was announced that America’s amateur-golf hero, Bobby Jones, who had repeatedly expressed interest in the new course, would make it to Holston Hills for at least an exhibition match, but it’s not clear that ever happened.
Locals appreciated it. One of the course’s early champions was Scottish-born Jimmy Thomson (1908-1985), the future Masters contender who lived in Knoxville for several years of his youth, as son and assistant of the golf pro at Holston Hills. Young Thomson even played miniature golf in town to stay in touch with putting. For many years he held Holston Hills’ course record of 66 strokes.
Women organized tournaments at the course. South Knoxville-bred journalist Paul Y. Anderson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for telling the full story of the Teapot Dome scandal, spent most of his career in Washington, but came back to Knoxville for a few weeks every summer to visit his mother in Island Home area, give a few luncheon speeches—and play golf at Holston Hills, telling reporters it was one of his favorite courses. Tommy Wright, who began his career as a Holston Hills caddy, emerged on national sports pages in the late 1930s as a PGA competitor.
Wright was half of a local duo who challenged Sam Snead and Ralph Guhdahl, both national champion players in 1940, to a dead-even exhibition match at Holston Hills in September, 1940. Flamboyant “Slammin’ Sammy” Snead, on course to be one of golf’s immortals, was only 28 when he was here. The visitors seemed awed by the course. “Gosh,” said Guhdahl, “you could hold a national championship here. Really you could.”
Tournament manager Fred Corcoran, famous as “Mr. Golf,” came to Knoxville on behalf of the PBA in the summer of 1945. Holston Hills, he was quoted to say, was “good enough for the National Open, and by far the best in the South.” Late that summer, he was there with some of golf’s biggest names, including Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, and Sam Snead—probably the three best golfers in America that year—for the Jaycees Supreme Open tournament. Also called the Knoxville Open by several 1945 sportswriters, the thunderstorm-plagued tournament went to Nelson, who won the PGA championship that year, with Hogan coming in third. The Holston Hills course, often called “tough” or even “cantankerous,” was probably more famous that summer than it’s ever been.
The PGA approved another official national tournament at Holston Hills in October, 1946. It drew several of the nation’s top professional golfers at the time: Chick Harbert, Dutch Harrison, Dick Metz, Australian champ Jim Ferrier, and Herman Keiser, that year’s dark-horse champion of the Masters Tournament in Augusta. For reasons unclear, organizers thought it might be fun to host one of Knoxville’s biggest golf tournaments on the same day as the biggest football game of the season, when the Vols played Alabama at Neyland Stadium. Keiser won it, and although the tournament got due national coverage on sports pages, what made more headlines in more than 100 newspapers from Maine to Hawaii was that this significant golf tournament was interrupted for a college football game. Rarely if ever was a national pro tournament ever interrupted out of respect for another sporting event.
Whether that indignity played a role or not, Holston Hills never achieved its destiny as a regular PGA tournament site, but a couple of memorable early players on the course became famous, albeit some behind the microphones in Nashville. Tennessee Ernie Ford, who played the course before he was a nationally known pop singer and TV personality--and comedian-singer Archie Campbell, who was a longtime Holston Hills member. More serious as a golfer than he was when portraying “Grandpappy” during the live-radio era, or later as the cigar-smoking wisecracker on Hee-Haw, Campbell won the Holston Hills golf championship in 1942, and was a recognizable regular at the course for the rest of his life.
Holston Hills had hosted women’s tournaments since the 1930s, and occasionally welcomed a national celebrity.
In May 1948, the legendary Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1911-1956), medalist in multiple contests in the 1932 Olympics, was working on her golf game, at age 36, and came to Holston Hills for an exhibition doubles match. She played on the course on two successive days, after her first try was rained out, and liked the course: "I've heard a lot about it, and it's everything it was supposed to be." Called "the world's greatest woman athlete," she declined favors and played the men's game, with men's tees, though never seeming to take the game seriously, laughing, singing, joking as she played. In the end, she lowered the women's record on the course by three strokes, hitting impossibly long drives that left the crowd of 1,500 "bug-eyed." She won the U.S. Women's Open that year.
Nine years later, women’s golf pioneer Patty Berg, first president of the LPGA and still considered one of the greatest golfers in history, played another, somewhat lower-key, exhibition game at Holston Hills in 1957, when she was 39.
An International Cup competition between U.S. and the United Kingdom golf teams came to Holston Hills in 1982, the year of the World’s Fair.
And near the end of his life, former course champ Archie Campbell sponsored the Archie Campbell Charity Invitational, a fundraiser for the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation, in 1986. Participating in the tournament were Nashville music legends Chet Atkins, Pee Wee King (72-year-old co-author of the “Tennessee Waltz”), as well as Western actors Claude Akins and Dale Robertson. Campbell himself was also playing, remarking that it would be “tacky” for him to win his own tournament. The winner was Tom Musselman, a college golf champ from the late ’50s. Although the tournament was announced as the first in an annual series, Campbell’s death less than a year later made it a one-off.
Although most big tournaments seem to gravitate toward newer and often slightly larger courses, many of them on the west side of town, Holston Hills remains a contender as an important course, hosting a few notable tournaments, like the Tennessee State Amateur in 2003, and the U.S. Golf Association’s Women’s Mid-Amateur tournament in 2004. In 2003, Golfweek magazine ranked it the nation’s 35th best “classic” course—that is, a course built before 1960. Three years later, Golf Magazine placed Holston Hills among America’s 100 finest golf courses. One local article about that distinction added that it was considered one of Ross’s best 10 surviving courses.
In recent years, offbeat online golf-course aficionado Andy Johnson has praised Holston Hills as “widely recognized as Tennessee’s premier course,” adding that it, among Donald Ross’s designs, it was the “world’s most untouched.” In 2016, he offered an enthusiastic hole-by-hole review of the course, noting both its beauty and challenge. To this day, Holston Hills is considered an unusually intact example of a legendary designer’s concept, from 1927, of what a perfect game of golf should be.
Donald Ross, designer of golf courses, including Holston Hills, 1905. (Wikipedia.)
Holston Hills Golf Course and Clubhouse, 1920s. (McClung Historical Collection.)
Jack is the Executive Director of the Knoxville History Project, an educational nonprofit whose mission is to research and promote the history of Knoxville. He is a journalist who has been writing about his hometown’s character and heritage for many years. He has written several books about Knoxville and its history, and they can be purchased in various places throughout the city including Union Avenue Books and the Visit Knoxville Gift Shop.
