The Two Henrys – Railroads Carry Golf Across Florida

[Images Left to Right: Henry Plant at the Tampa Bay Hotel c1898 and Florida East Coast Golf Club Bulletin 1898]

John Hamilton Gillespie sold Henry Bradley Plant on the notion of promoting golf as a tourist attraction when Plant was building his Florida west coast railroad and hotel empire from Belleair, Florida to Cuba in the 1880s and 1890s. Plant hired Gillespie to design and build golf courses for his investment company in Winter Haven, Kissimmee, Tampa, Belleair, and Havana, Cuba. At the same time, Henry Morrison Flagler, the founder of Florida’s East Coast Railway, was extending his railroad and hotel empire along Florida’s Atlantic coast from St. Augustine to Miami and over to Nassau, Bahamas. Recognizing the value of building golf courses with his resorts, Flagler created the Florida East Coast Golf Club in 1898. The Club combined Flagler’s golf links at St. Augustine, Ormond, Palm Beach, Miami, and Nassau, so that membership in one course provided membership in all the courses.

Today, Florida’s oldest existing golf courses are from the Plant and Flagler era. Both the West Course of the Belleair Country Club in Belleair, on the Gulf of Mexico, and the Ocean Course at The Breakers in Palm Beach on the Atlantic, can trace their first golf holes back to 1897. In 1897, the West Course at Belleair began with six holes on elevated greens surfaced with crushed seashells. It was extended to nine holes two years later. In 1909, the West Course grew to eighteen holes and was redesigned again in 1915 by golf course architect Donald J. Ross, who was then commissioned to build an additional 18-hole course for Belleair. The Ocean Course at The Breakers also began as a six-hole course in 1897. The holes had names like Easy Street, Punch Bowl, and Waterloo. By 1901 it had expanded to 18 holes. And like Belleair, Donald Ross was hired to redesign the course in 1938. The success of Flagler and Plant’s design of pairing their resorts with golf courses did not go unnoticed by future Florida developers. Some of Florida’s best and most successful developers, George Merrick in Coral Gables, Carl Fisher of Miami Beach, and D.P. Davis of Tampa and St. Augustine, saw the value that golf brought to their properties and the popularity of the game with their clients and guests. Many of their courses can be played on Florida’s Historic Golf Trail.