Virginia Golfer Jan / Feb 2016 | Page 11

CHAMPIONS GALORE downturn, Danville GC had around 420 members. Today that number is around 310. “It’s pretty difficult to spend a lot of celebration money that there’s not going to be some return on,” Lea says. “We simply don’t have it to do.” Princess Anne’s Tazewell and his wife live on the 18th hole. He says he’s happy to have been a member—there are around 1,100 of them today—all these years. “It’s been interesting to watch it change and grow…when I first joined it was one of the premier clubs in Virginia,” Tazewell says. “This was long before the explosion of country clubs. “One thing I do remember is the fact the mosquitoes would eat you alive (on the golf course) before World War II. Mosquito control didn’t come in until sometime in the middle of World War II. You wouldn’t even think about going out to play golf without mosquito stuff all over you.” The Woodlands Golf Course has undergone a number of name changes in the past 100 years. Information provided by A.G. Womble, chairman of the City of Hampton Golf Advisory Committee, shows the property on which the current course sits opened as the Old Point Comfort Golf and PHOTO CREDIT HERE The site of today’s Woodland Golf Course in Hampton originally opened in 1916 as Old Point Comfort Golf and Country Club. A plaque detailing the founders of Danville Golf Club in 1916 remains outside the clubhouse today. Country Club. In the “About” section of the course’s web site (thewoodlandsva.com), it’s noted that Golf Magazine once included the course in a list of the “First 100 Clubs in America.” Old Point Comfort, which played host to the VSGA Amateur in 1920, was owned and operated by the Chamberlin Hotel. Golfers were transported to the course by trolley on a train track. According to Womble’s history, the site became the Hampton Roads Golf and Country Club in the early 1920s. An earlier incarnation of the Hampton Roads Golf and Country Club (1895) was among the six founding clubs of the VSGA. It was the venue for the 1913 VSGA Amateur. Sometime in the 1920s (depending on the source), the later version of the Hampton Roads Golf and Country Club was re-designed by world renowned architect Donald Ross. The course was the venue for the 1931 VSGA Amateur. The name was changed again in the late 1930s to Chamberlin Country Club. It became Hampton Country Club in the mid-1940s. The City of Hampton purchased the golf course in 1973, and the layout underwent a complete renovation by the two Aults and Clark. The course reopened in 1976 as the Hampton Golf Club and was renamed The Woodlands in 1983. “The grounds now have had three different course