Onwentsia at 125 Lake Forest club celebrates its 125th anniversary by reflecting on rich history BY DAVID A. F. SWEET T he Onwentsia Club golf course sits unobtrusively behind a strand of trees just south of downtown Lake Forest, one of the jewels in the crown of Chicago’s North Shore suburbs. The club’s quiet demeanor and devotion to privacy belie the significant place Onwentsia holds in the history of golf in the world , not just in the Chicago District. Onwentsia has played host to the country’s biggest tournaments, including the U.S. Open (1906) and the U.S. Amateur (1899). The club—which is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year—has impeccable ties to the cradle of golf, St. Andrews. Its first pro, Robert Foulis, grew up a few blocks from the Old Course, and his father manu-factured golf clubs with Old Tom Morris. Its second pro, Willie Marshall, was raised next door to Foulis. Those who have played the 6,600-yard layout encompass the biggest names in the history of the game. A few weeks before the famous 1913 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, defending U.S. Open champion Ted Ray and former U.S. Open champion Harry Vardon played in a 36-hole exhibition match at Onwentsia. Nicklaus, Palmer and Trevino walked the course when woods were still made of actual wood. PGA champion Keegan Bradley etched a score in the 60s on the par-71 layout earlier this century. How did this course—one of only five in the country to host the U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, U.S. Women’s Amateur and U.S. Senior Amateur—come to be? In 1892, soon-to-be-famous golf architect Charles Blair Macdonald laid out seven holes over 20 acres in Lake Forest at the home of Senator Charles B. Farwell, not long before Macdonald laid out Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton. A few years later, Macdon-ald and Foulis created a nine-hole course on a farm located just a booming drive from where Onwentsia stands today. It was known as the Lake Forest Golf Club, a place where sheep roamed, sometimes nibbling at errant shots. In 1895, the Lake Forest Golf Club purchased a 175-acre farm from Henry Ives Cobb for $75,000. It included his sprawling home, which would be transformed into a club-house (the majestic one that now stands, designed by Harrie T. Lindeberg, was built in the 1920s). The club would be known as Onwentsia – an Iroquois name meaning both a meeting place of sporting braves and squaws as well as country (thus it’s never had reason to refer to itself as a country club). Founding members included famous Chicago names, from Cyrus Hall McCormick Jr., head of International Harvester, to Byron Laflin Smith, founder of the Northern Trust Company. Its first president, Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, also served as the first president of the Western Golf Association. None of those facts is in dispute. But nearly 125 years later, the question remains: Who designed the Onwentsia golf course? Macdonald, Foulis, H. J. Whigham and Herbert James Tweedie—four giants of the JUNE 2020 | CHICAGO DISTRICT GOLFER | 45
Chicago District Golfer June 2020: Page 45
