Links to the Past: A Historic Resource Study of National Park Service Golf Courses in the District of Columbia

Babin, Patricia

The National Capital Region of the National Park Service has three golf courses under its management authority: East Potomac Park Golf Course, Rock Creek Golf Course, and Langston Golf Course, all located in the District of Columbia. Between 1917 and 1948, the federal government built seven public golf courses and three miniature golf courses on federal land in the District of Columbia, a testament to the rise in the popularity of the sport of golf and the demand for public golf courses for those who could not afford private memberships to exclusive golf clubs in the early decades of the 20th century. While reflecting the nation-wide trend of public golf, the courses also illustrate the effort of cities across the country to provide active or organized recreation facilities in public parks in the early 20th century, a trend that was not ignored by the federal government despite its somewhat complicated role in the development of recreation areas in the District of Columbia. While public golf courses strove to provide facilities for those who could not afford private clubs and to emphasize the democracy of golf as a sport not only for the elite, the majority of public courses, particularly those in the southern states, were open to whites only. In Washington, DC, African American golfers established local and national clubs and associations, petitioned for a course of their own, and ultimately fought the Jim Crow segregation policies practiced within the city’s recreation areas. The culmination of their efforts was the construction of Langston Golf Course, opened in 1939 to replace an inadequate course on the Lincoln Memorial grounds; the official desegregation of all of the public golf courses by the Department of the Interior and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes in 1941; and the desegregation of all of the city’s recreation areas in 1954. The majority of the public golf courses in the District of Columbia were built during an era known as the Golden Age of Golf, a period beginning in the 1910s and ending around the Great Depression that produced some of the most innovative and influential courses in the United States. The popularity of the sport increased in this era as did the number of courses, which grew from around 750 in 1916 to nearly 6,000 in 1930. The architects of the District of Columbia’s public golf courses, including Walter J. Travis and William S. Flynn, were some of the most noted golf architects of their time, illustrating the importance of the courses as well as the design philosophies instituted during golf’s Golden Age. This Historic Resource Study (HRS) is designed to provide a historic overview of the National Park Service golf courses in the District of Columbia and to evaluate the significance of the golf courses within their historic contexts. Specifically, the goal of the HRS is to document the connection of the golf courses to the larger historic context of the development of urban recreation and the segregation of recreational facilities in the District of Columbia. The HRS was completed in conjunction with a Cultural Landscape Inventory (CLI) for each of the three golf courses. Together these documents will provide much-needed baseline documentation of the golf courses and will ultimately assist the National Park Service in planning for the management, interpretation, and public use of the three extant golf courses in the District of Columbia. The two studies will be available for incorporation into current planning efforts by the National Park Service.

Links to the Past: A Historic Resource Study of National Park Service Golf Courses in the District of Columbia

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