Davenport Country Club was born an old soul.

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The golf course was a parkland classic at conception, built upon 140 acres of sturdy and challenging old bones, old school even as the game of golf only was beginning to come of age in America in the first quarter of the 20th Century.

 

As such, the Iowa club on the Mississippi River bluffs was destined to age gracefully from the moment Joe R. Lane and eight fellow members of the inaugural board of governors submitted articles of incorporation to Scott County Recorder A.E. Lindquist on Feb. 1, 1924.

 

The course wasn’t yet a glimmer in a gifted architect’s mind’s eye, but a blank canvas composed of slender ridges, open valleys, majestic cliffs and a pair of meandering creeks was brimming with promise.

 

That promise quickly was realized when the golf course officially debuted as an inventively-routed, 18-hole Charles Hugh Alison design on Memorial Day 1925.

 

DCC arrived as the fifth golf course in the Quad Cities proper, although it would more properly be described as “near” the Quad Cities. And, not especially near at that, considering the fledgling capabilities of the automobile in the 1920s.

 

Situated in the eastern-most sector of Scott County, between the quaint river town of LeClaire and the mellifluously named country township of Pleasant Valley, the course emerged a full eight miles from the nearest border of the city whose name it claimed.

 

Longtime members still reverently refer to the place as the “Country Club,” a term that rightly honors DCC’s roots. After all, that is what Davenport Country Club was at inception: a club in the country.

 

The rural escape was birthed across an expanse of rolling, bucolic farmland purchased primarily from the ubiquitous Mr. Lane, along with a fellow gentleman farmer named Reinhardt Schulz.

 

Given the 100 years across which this parkland playground has so naturally fit the land, it is curious now to note a May 1924 Daily Times article dared to suggest shaping a golf course from the old-boned acreage confronted members with an “apparently hopeless situation.”

 

That was a journalistic triple bogey.

 

Under the perfectly accurate headline “Davenport Country Club Beautiful New Playground for Whole Family,” the story further stated: “The ground purchased for the Country Club had been chosen primarily for its wonderful scenic beauty, its fitness for a golf course being a secondary consideration.”

 

That’s a curious assertion considering the property’s potential already had been deemed second to none by famed designer Tom Bendelow.

 

The Scottish-born Bendelow’s 400-plus-courses-over-35-years resume ultimately would include Olympia Fields and Medinah Country Clubs, two Chicago-area courses that collectively have hosted five U.S. Opens, four PGA Championships and a Ryder Cup, and further burnishing Bendelow’s bona fides was East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta. That course debuted in 1904 with a six-year-old Robert Tyre Jones Jr., on hand for the ceremonial first tee shot. At East Lake, the budding golf legend who’d become better known as Bobby honed the rhythmic swing that would claim 13 major titles, four in 1930 alone. Today, East Lake is host to the PGA TOUR’s season-ending Tour Championship.

 

In other words, Bendelow’s opinion carried considerable weight when he was contracted by DCC’s founding fathers to weigh the distant property Joe Lane so passionately promoted against a second option inside Davenport’s borders, a perfectly suitable tract of land that now encompasses Duck Creek Park.

 

Bendelow’s enthusiastic recommendation was to build on the more distant tract of land on the Mississippi bluffs.

 

“You can have as good a golf course terrain as anyone could wish for; and with a judicious expenditure of money, as good a course as you will find anywhere,” Bendalow declared. “You will travel long and far and not see another like it, and any comparisons that can be made with any other similar project will only redound to your credit.”

 

The Captain’s Course

 

Ultimately, credit for Davenport Country Club would not “redound” to Bendelow.

 

DCC’s design instead was entrusted to a native Englishman who ventured across the Atlantic in the aftermath of the first World War, where he’d served as a captain in the British Army.

 

That was a rank Charles Hugh Alison still claimed when, in 1921, he landed in America on a mission to help grow the game first conceived in the 15th century amid sand and sheep on the windswept coasts of Scotland.

 

“Commission to design and supervise the construction of an 18-hole golf course for the new Davenport Country Club has been awarded to the firm of Colt & Alison, golf course architects of London, England, it has been announced by directors of the club,” read an April 15, 1924 report in the Daily Times.

 

“The active designing and layout of the course will be in the hands of Captain C.H. Alison, the American representative of the firm, with headquarters at Detroit, Mich.”

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Alison’s passion for the game had been seeded around the turn of the century when he was the youngest member of an Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society team that toured the U.S. in 1903.

 

After failing to complete college, Alison wisely abandoned an intended career in journalism to serve as secretary of the newly created Stoke Poges Golf Club near London. It was there he met Harry S. Colt, who he assisted with the completion of Stoke Poges.

 

In the years before the war, Alison apprenticed for Colt in the construction of several more London area courses, and, following the war, the two men formed a lifelong partnership. For a time, their firm included Alister Mackenzie, who on his own would go on to design such world-famous tracks as the Cypress Point Golf Club on the scenic California coast as well as Bobby Jones’ hallowed Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.

 

Alison’s reputation never may have fully matched that of Mackenzie. Yet, in retrospect Captain Alison would earn full rank among the Golden Age of Architects, designing or renovating more than 100 courses around the world. His work took him from the United States, back to Europe, and then Japan, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and, finally, South Africa, where he died in 1952 at the age of 70.

 

Alison’s lasting ties to Colt earned the designation of “best sidekick in golf architecture history” in a 2011 featured story in “Golf Course Architecture: The Global Journal of Golf Course Design and Development.” Yet, even that article’s author, Adam Lawrence, arrived at a conclusion held by many other modern experts: Alison’s work clearly stands on its own.

 

“I think Alison was overshadowed by his partner, H.S. Colt, who really did very little work in the United States,” said Ron Whitten, who served as senior editor for golf course architecture at Golf Digest magazine from 1985 through 2000. He also co-authored two authoritative books on course design, including the exhaustive “The Architects of Golf” in 1993.

 

“Alison was a very prolific architect,” Whitten said, “and he did some fine courses.”

 

Among Alison’s most highly regarded designs are Milwaukee Country Club in Wisconsin; North Shore, Knollwood and Bob ‘o Link near Chicago; and the Burning Tree Club near the nation’s capitol. Five of the most respected early courses in Japan are his work, including fabled Tokyo Country Club.

 

Alison also served as a consultant in finishing Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey, when its credited designer, George Crump, died prior to its completion. For decades, Pine Valley has stood as the near-unanimous No.1-rated golf course in the world.

 

An Old Soul Ages Well

 

Highly regarded too is the course with the old bones on the Mississippi River bluff.

 

That’s arguably more true today than at any point in the past century.  In part, that’s because Alison’s place in the Golden Era pantheon has grown stronger over the decades. Equally essential to DCC’s growing regard, however, is a 2014 renovation. The most strategically intentional of the many its members have undertaken through the years, the renovated layout reclaimed the best of the architect’s work while adding elements that smartly accommodate the modern game.

 

As much as he appreciates Alison’s foundational work, Whitten credits the modern-day team of Ron Forse and Jim Nagle, lead partners in Forse Golf Design Inc., for raising the profile of the Country Club as it arrives on the cusp of a second century.

 

“It’s a very distinctive course, and I give a lot of credit to Ron Forse and Jim Nagle for finishing it off,” said Whitten, whose expertise is heightened by his own late-in-life entry into the field of golf course design. A Kansas-based lawyer prior to joining Golf Digest, Whitten’s third career chapter includes an active role in the creation of Erin Hills,  a public course in Hartford, Wisc., that has hosted a U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur since its debut in 2006.

 

“I hesitate to use the word restoration,” Whitten said in assessing the 2014 DCC changes, “because restoration to me means going back to the original irrigation system and going back to the half-inch mowed greens. Nobody’s doing that. No golfer would enjoy that. We want to enjoy the game that we know today but we want to play it on these vintage old courses. It’s like a vintage automobile that if you restored it, you’ve got to make it run on unleaded gas or you’re not going anywhere.

 

“It’s interesting to see a course like Davenport that was always ranked among the top 5 in Iowa in Golf Digest but it never had much national attention,” he concluded. “Now, I think it gets some national buzz and I’m happy to see that.”

 

Indeed, national rankings hold the course in higher regard in its dotage than they did in its youth.

 

This spring, GolfWeek magazine again ranked DCC No. 1 in the state of Iowa, ahead of the Harvester near Ames and the Donald Ross-designed Cedar Rapids Country Club. In June of 2023, it was elevated to 69th (from 73rd in the previous rankings) among the top 200 classic courses built prior to 1960.

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In 2021, Golf Magazine rated DCC No. 27 in the entire Midwest, and it was second among that magazine’s “Ten Gems Overlooked in the U.S. Top 100.” The latter list was compiled by Tom Doak, himself a preeminent modern course designer whose work includes six courses ranked among the world’s 100 best.

 

In Volume 3 of his series “The Confidential Guide to Courses: The Americas,” published in 2016, Doak wondered how he and other experts previously had missed DCC when assessing Alison’s best work.

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“It’s hard to fathom how such a course could be overlooked for so long,” Doak wrote after paying a playing visit in the summer of 2015. “I certainly did not expect it to be better than Alison’s more famous tracks. But you learn something new with every trip.”

 

Gil Hanse, a Doak contemporary in modern course architecture, was on a business trip from Nebraska to Ohio when he came to Exit 306, the last I-80 stop in Iowa. Hanse turned right on U.S. 67 and found himself heading up Valley Drive just to see what all the DCC buzz was about.

 

“He was driving through and just stopped in the pro shop and asked if he could walk the course,” DCC general manager John Panek recalled.

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Best known perhaps for building the course that hosted golf’s return to the Olympics in 2016 in Rio, the most impressive work on Hanse’s extensive resume lies in the renovations of such venerated classics as Merion, Oakland Hills, Oakmont, Los Angeles Country Club, Olympic, Southern Hills and Winged Foot.

 

That is a veritable Who’s Who of old-souled courses that resound in American golf history. Yet, en route from Nebraska to Ohio, Hanse took a walk around one more such classic.

 

That he walked away duly impressed says much about the company kept by the club on the Mississippi River bluffs.

 

Now officially a centenarian, Davenport Country Club has most assuredly aged with abounding grace.

 

This is the story of the Country Club and the people who made — and continue to make — its grand century of history.