Our History
It is a little hard to say when golf first came to Blue Hill. In 1903, John Teagle, a summer resident of Parker Point, bought a sizable chunk of land for the purpose from Alfred C. Osgood and by 1904 it was golfable. Teagle certainly did not get it just for himself.
There are no records, but it seems certain that a group of other cottagers were part of the plan but hadn’t gotten organized—or if they had, the records are lost.
One can guess who they must have been: John C. Rose of Baltimore; Victor O. Strobel of Philadelphia; C. Eugene Riggs of St. Paul, Minn.; Aaron S. Thomas and Dr. Allan M. Thomas, both of New York; H.E. Krehbiel, also of New York; and George F. Cochran of Baltimore.
Together, in 1910, these are the men who formed the “Parker Point Golf Company,” with the stated purpose of buying, selling, and improving real estate in the town of Blue Hill. The real estate in question was most of the present golf course and a couple of small islands.
Note that it was a real company, set up to make money, with gorgeously engraved shares of stock. The beginning of the company is not the beginning of the club, however. A good guess is that the club existed in some form in 1906.
In 1911, the club got busy planning a clubhouse, and sent a committee (Aaron Thomas and Blanche Phillips Weston) to the company to propose a “building, to be one story, 30 x 34’ with a piazza 10 x 30’, with a basement wherein one can place a locker room and sufficient space for machines. The estimated cost is $600.” [Using the Consumer Price Index, this translates to around $13,000. It was not an expensive building by any standard.] It seems to have been finished in 1912, but in 1915, a committee proposed “the enlargement of the porch, which could be carried out for $245.”
With nearly constant repair and addition, this basic clubhouse served its members for the next eighty years. Numerous minutes memorialize the creakiness, the rot, the water that flowed through the foundation in the spring, the poor kitchen, the elderly plumbing. Nevertheless, it was patched and fixed and made to do, but by 2004 the board of governors fairly unanimously decided it was time to tear it down and start over. What followed was two years of acrimony, with many members convinced the board was right and courageous, and many members convinced that it was heedless, destructive, and profligate. Feelings ran high and there were mailings, meetings, and mutterings. As the bylaws required an affirmative vote of all members before assessing or borrowing, and as the board needed to do both in order to tackle such a large project, the whole issue had to be publicly voted up or down. In August of 2006, a majority of members cast their ballots for the project. In September of 2007, the old clubhouse was emptied out and torn down, and the summer of 2008 saw a brand new clubhouse more or less on the same footprint.
