1 Augusta The buds burst forth in brilliance every spring, azaleas and honeysuckles, dogwoods and oaks, forsythia, tulips, and magnolias, more than 350 varieties of plants and trees in all, providing a fragrant flowering of warm colors on seventy acres of lush land in Augusta, Georgia. The pageantry of color is further intensified by tradition. Caddies wear white coveralls; winners don green jackets. Marshals and trash squads are similarly dressed in standardized uniforms. The brown water in the hazards is transformed into a more optically pleasing bright blue, courtesy of calcozine dye. A sudden spring rain casts what Sports Illustrated once called "a mellow patina" over brightly colored umbrellas hastily raised over the heads of fans dampened by a downpour. Spectators, thousands strong, stand among the purple frieze as players ponder putts amid pine-lined grounds. Augusta is a spectacle of sport.
It is a ritual; it is tradition. It is a former indigo plantation being transformed in 1857 into a nursery by the new owner of the land, Louis Berckmans, a baron of Belgian descent. A native of the small town of Lierre, Louis was born in October of 1801 into a family of proprietors and estate owners in Belgium. The Belgian Revolution in 1830-31 was contested over the Berckmans'' land, and in 1851 Louis and his family came to the New World and took up residence in Plainfield, New Jersey. Louis and his son Prosper began a nursery boasting wide varieties of pears and additional fruit trees. The nobleman moved with his family to Augusta in 1857, buying the 365-acre indigo plantation and converting it into Fruitland Nurseries. Emphasizing plant life, Louis and Prosper imported plants and trees from other countries. Prosper is said to have favored the azaleas that populate Augusta, with more than thirty varieties of the colorful, sweet-smelling plant blooming in brilliant colors for two to three weeks between March and May.
When Bobby Jones arrived in Augusta seeking a plot of land upon which to build the golfing champion''s dream course, he was stunned by the beauty of the property. "Perfect!" Jones reportedly exclaimed upon his first viewing of Fruitland Nurseries. This ground, he said, had been waiting years for someone to place a golf course on it. Augusta''s ground is historic, playing critical roles in the Revolutionary War and Civil War. Inhabited in the early 1700s by Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Yuchi Indians, it was used by Indigenous Americans as a place to cross the Savannah River, named after the Savano Indians. Augusta''s first English settlement came in 1736, with British general James Oglethorpe naming the colony in honor of Princess Augusta, the wife of the Prince of Wales, Frederick Louis. Augusta would become known as the second city of Georgia, as it was considered the second capital of the state. It served as the capital during the Revolutionary War following the fall of Savannah to the British.
Augusta then fell to Lt. Col. Archibald Campbell in January 1779, but the British withdrew not long after as American troops gathered on the shores of the Savannah. Augusta again became the capital city of Georgia but fell again to the British during the war. The city of Augusta hosts the lone structure built and completed by the Confederate States of America, the Confederate Powder Works. It entailed twenty-six buildings along a two-mile stretch and produced 2.75 million pounds of gunpowder, making Augusta the centerpiece of the Confederacy''s production of firepower. The Augusta Canal, constructed in 1845, allowed Augusta to become the second-biggest inland cotton market in the world.
Unlike its role in the Revolutionary War, Augusta was mostly unscarred by battle in the Civil War. It served as a major rail center for Confederates, the most notable being in September 1863 when the rebel troops of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet traveled from Virginia to Chickamauga via Augusta. It became a hospital center to accommodate mounting casualties, with funds for the sick and wounded being raised by many of Augusta''s leading citizens, including the Rev. Dr. Joseph R. Wilson, the father of future U.
S. president Woodrow Wilson. On his historic March to the Sea late in 1864, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman bypassed Augusta. Despite Sherman''s assertion that he decided not to attack Augusta due to the large concentration of Confederate troops in the city, local folklore states that Sherman had been secretly ordered by U.S. president Abraham Lincoln not to destroy Augusta because the First Lady''s sister owned large stores of cotton in the city.
A century later Bobby Jones, a man called by essayist Herbert Warren Wind the most favored son of the South since Robert E. Lee, made sports history in 1930 by winning the Grand Slam of golf. Described by the Associated Press as having a "short, stocky figure" and being golf ''s "Napoleon" who strode over rolling battlegrounds, Jones nonetheless was a weary warrior at the still-young age of twenty-eight. Having achieved a feat for the ages, he retired from competitive golf. Jones''s announcement shocked the sports world, but physically and mentally he had paid a price, dealing with the pressure of high-level competition and the stress of being the favorite in every tournament he played in. He longed to play the game in a more relaxed atmosphere, to enjoy it with friends. Jones met Clifford Roberts in the autumn of 1930, the young champion having been invited by the middle-aged Wall Street investment banker to view a tract of land they believed fit with Bobby''s plans to build a course that reflected his love for the sport. Jones and Roberts proved as different as two people could be.
Jones was a southern gentleman, Roberts a native midwesterner who had moved from Chicago to New York. Jones was sensitive, Roberts relentless. Traveling from Atlanta to Augusta, Jones met with Roberts, and Cliff drove Bobby down the double row of magnolias that led to Fruitland Manor, which dated to the antebellum era. Fruitland Manor would later be converted into the Augusta National Clubhouse. Jones stood in front of the manor and viewed the vast expanse of land before him. He said later he knew instantly it was the terrain he had always hoped to find. He once told Sports Illustrated he was overwhelmed by the "possibilities of the golf course that could be built in such a setting." The course would serve as the grounds for an annual tournament for Jones and his friends, and as Bobby and Cliff shared the same passion for a private club, they set about raising money.
That they did this during the Great Depression, a time when most golf courses were closing, made for a great challenge. Jones and Roberts paid $70,000 to purchase Fruitland Nurseries and worked with the third generation of Berckmans associated with Augusta, Prosper''s sons, Prosper Jr. and Louis Alphonse. It was Louis who advised on the placement of the many trees and plants. Jones teamed with Scottish architect Alister MacKenzie to create a course that Herbert Warren Wind in 1955 called "very probably the most appealing inland course ever built anywhere." The Augusta Chronicle on July 15, 1931, announced the news with the headline "Bobby Jones to Build His Ideal Golf Course on Berckmans'' Place." Course construction took less than two years to complete, a remarkably quick process aided no doubt by the fact that, as golf historian John Boyette wrote in 2016, Jones and MacKenzie were two men of one mind when it came to Augusta National. Jones chose MacKenzie over more famous course architects, Donald Ross among them, and the history behind the friendship between Jones and MacKenzie is somewhat shrouded.
"The mystery of how Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie first met--and how Jones arrived at picking MacKenzie to design Augusta National Golf Club--has never been fully explained," Boyette wrote. The mystery involves the Old and New Worlds, yet as Boyette notes, golf historians have never been able to state definitively when the lives of these two legends first intersected. Their initial encounter may have come at St. Andrews, the birthplace of golf. Jones was.