Grass types: A1/A4 bentgrass (greens), bentgrass (fairways)
William Flynn’s championship course at Lancaster Country Club, comprising what are now called the Meadowcreek and Dogwood nines, has a complex architectural history. Hired in 1920, Flynn revised the club’s existing nine-hole layout on a hilly property overlooking the Conestoga River and added nine holes of his own. Until his death in 1944, Flynn remained Lancaster’s consulting architect. He oversaw numerous changes, most significantly in 1941 when he added four new holes—today’s Nos. 3-6—across the river. Since 2005, restoration specialists Ron Forse and Jim Nagle have worked with the club to rebuild bunkers and greens, remove trees, and selectively expand fairways. To fully recapture the design that existed at the time of Flynn’s passing, additional widening and naturalizing would be necessary. As it stands, though, the course is a fair representation of Flynn’s approach to championship architecture. It showed well at the 2015 U.S. Women’s Open and undoubtedly will again at this year’s edition of that tournament.
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Take Note…
Not pronounced how you (and Bradley Cooper) think. Club employees and members are probably tired of tutoring visitors in the proper Pennsylvania pronunciation of “Lancaster,” so let me give it a try: “LANG-kiss-ter.” Put a heavy accent on the first syllable and say the next two syllables in a slight rush. Bradley Cooper apparently missed this bit of local color in his prep for the movie Joy.
Early Flynn. William Flynn was considerably younger than most architects now regarded as key contributors to the “Golden Age” of golf architecture in America. Whereas Donald Ross, Seth Raynor, Alister MacKenzie, A.W. Tillinghast, George Crump, Hugh Wilson, George Thomas, and Perry Maxwell—all born in the 1870s—were well into middle age as golf course design blossomed in the post-World War I United States, Flynn was only 29 when Lancaster Country Club hired him in 1920. Much of his reputation-making work was completed in the mid-1920s, and the Great Depression stunted what likely would have been an even more impressive career.
The other nine. Architect Brian Silva, best known for his Seth Raynor restorations, built Lancaster’s third regulation nine, the Highlands, in 1994. It travels out and back on the “other” (that is, south) side of the Conestoga River and, to my eye, looks somewhat overshaped, with containment mounding prominent throughout. The contrast between Silva’s holes and the Flynn 18 provides a tidy case study in the differences between Golden Age and late-20th-century golf aesthetics. Members seem to enjoy the Highlands course, however, often combining it with one of the Flynn nines for an alternative 18-hole routing.
