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