Cherry Hill Club celebrates 100 years

The Cherry Hill Club, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, has always been very unique in Canadian golf.

Located down the Niagara Peninsula in Ridgeway, Cherry Hill is a spectacular parkland-style golf course with a historic old clubhouse.

Architect Ian Andrew from Brantford, who has done a bunker restoration there, is on record as saying “Cherry Hill has the best set of greens in Canada.”

And as someone who has played this great club a few times over the years, I wouldn’t argue with Ian on that point.

Cherry Hill was designed and built by Australian-American golf course architect and champion golfer Walter Travis in 1922.

“A hundred years later, the course still plays the way Walter Travis wanted you to play it, which is the ground game,” says head professional Walker Arnott.

“And the real star of the show are the greens. The green complexes are magnificent for a flat piece of land and we play them at a daily speed above 12. There’s so much subtlety in them and that celebrates the fact that Travis was a genius.”

What makes Cherry Hill really unique, however, is its history and how it has evolved and how it played an important role in Canadian golf.

That’s because the course was founded and built in Canada by Americans. And for most of its history, the Cherry Hill Club membership was primarily from the Buffalo area.

In the early 1900s, well-heeled Buffalo area residents were buying property on the north shore of Lake Erie in places like Point Abino, Lorraine Bay and Crystal Beach and built summer homes.

“These were prominent businessmen or professionals from Buffalo who also had golf memberships at the Park Club or the Country Club of Buffalo,” explains Mike Reynolds, the president of Cherry Hill, who is a Buffalo resident.

“Before the Peace Bridge was built, they would have to head to the ferry dock from their cottages, take the ferry across the river, drive to their course, play and then repeat the process in the opposite direction to get home to a cold dinner and an angry wife.”

Reynolds, who recently finished writing the club’s 100-year history, said the theory is that a group of them just decided that they should build their own course closer to their cottages.

“And there may have been a bit of an influence in the fact that, at the time, prohibition was in effect in the United States but not in Canada,” he adds.

The group hired Travis to be their architect and paid him $3,000. The cost to build the course was $52,245.72. It would likely cost more than $10 million to build that course today.

Travis, who is in the World Golf Hall of Fame, primarily for winning the US Amateur in three consecutive years, 1901-03, had the nickname “The Old Man” because he didn’t take up golf until he was in his mid- 30s.

He wasn’t a prolific golf course designer, laying out probably no more than 50. Of those, about 38 still remain, including the three he did in Canada, Lookout Point in Fonthill, Club de Golf de Grand-Mere in Shawinigan, Quebec , and Cherry Hill.

His work is, however, highly acclaimed, according to Chip Capraro, president of the Walter J. Travis Society.

He noted that he was building Cherry Hill and Lookout Point at the exact same time on very different pieces of land.

“Cherry Hill is a relatively flat property and at Lookout Point there are large changes in elevation that he had to figure out how to get up and down,” explains Capraro. “Very different pieces of land but both are spectacular golf courses. I think that’s an example of his genius as a designer.”

Cherry Hill opened its first nine holes on July 9, 1924.

“There were nine founding members, all from Buffalo, and about 40-50 original subscribers,” says Reynolds. “There were a couple of Canadian members early on, but it remained largely American for the first 75-80 years of its existence.”

That changed dramatically over the last few years, largely because of COVID-19.

“COVID really swung things to the point where we are now about 50-50,” explains Reynolds.

“During COVID, Americans didn’t have access to the course because of the border closure. At the same time, Canadians weren’t able to find a tee time anywhere and we had room on our membership roster.”

Even during the period when the membership was heavily weighted towards Americans, the club felt the need to do their part for Canadian golf.

Over the years they have hosted numerous tournaments, including the Canadian Open in 1972 won by Gay Brewer and the 1982 Labatt’s International for the Canadian Professional Golfers Association Championship where Jim Thorpe of Buffalo defeated Canadian Dave Barr in a playoff.

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