Editor’s Note: Tryon Country Club is celebrating its 100-year anniversary this year and plans a celebration next weekend, Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1. Saturday includes a celebration at 5 p.m. with a Sunday golf tournament at 2 p.m. and ice cream social at 4 p.m. Country club members and special guests are invited to attend. The following article details the history of Albert “Bert” Leonard, who built Tryon Country Club’s golf course.

 

In August 1898 Robert Albert “Bert” Leonard, a 19 year old Englishman, arrived at the Port of Philadelphia with “$1.00 and a railroad ticket to New York City” in his pocket, according to immigration records.  A relative wired him eight more dollars and he was “released” to learn the trade of golf, just as the game was gaining widespread popularity in America.  A few years later he would bring the new sport to Lynn, Tryon, and Polk County, and would become “the reason for golf” in the Carolina foothills.

 

“Alf” Leonard, Bert’s older brother, was working at the newly-built Yahnundasis Golf Club at Utica, New York.  He sent for Bert with the promise of employment.  At Yahnundasis the brothers gained “hands-on” experience with the game of golf and with the layout and construction of golf courses.  By 1902 “Alf” Leonard was in Utah, where he became the golf professional at the Salt Lake City Country Club, one of the oldest in the west.

In 1901, “Colonel” Aaron S. French met Bert Leonard in New York and invited him to come to Polk County, North Carolina, where French co-owned Mimosa Inn, and the Skyuka Hotel on the slopes of Tryon Mountain.  Leonard built “Mimosa Golf Links” for Mr. French along the creek and in the small valley at what is now the intersection of NC 108 and Skyuka Road, between Lynn and Columbus.  The full size nine-hole course was the first in the area, and Bert served as the “pro,” teaching golf and promoting the enterprise.  On the early morning of July 2, 1902 he married Dora Belle Capps at her parent’s home in Lynn.  Two days later the new course hosted a 4^th of July celebration featuring a “basket dinner” followed by “a baseball game between Tryon and Columbus.”

In 1914, Tryon resident Emma Payne Erskine and a group of local business leaders and promoters began to work toward building a golf course on Ms. Erskine’s property in what was then know as “Holly Hills Valley,” just to the west of town.  One of the promoters, George H. Holmes, himself a native of England, and a civil engineer and banker, prepared a detailed plat of the “Golf Links of Tryon Country Club, Tryon, NC” on the property of the “Erskine-Corwin Estate.”  That document shows a 2,945 yard nine hole course, a “club house site,” and 58 residential lots.  The National Register of Historic Places application that led to the listing of the property in 2013 states that “…secondary sources attribute the design to golf course architect Donald Ross,” but that “no primary documentation has been located to definitively confirm Ross as the designer.”  Bert Leonard was hired to supervise the laying out and building of the course, and he and his wife and three children moved into an old log cabin on the property.

Tryon resident John Vining recently located an article that appeared in the January, 1915 issue of Sky-Land magazine (“Stories of Picturesque North Carolina”) showing that the course was in then place.  The article, by one Hilliard Booth, is titled “A Visit to the Home of Payne Erskine,” the pen name of author Emma Payne Erskine.  The article recounts an outing to her Tryon Country Club project:

“There is one accomplishment of which I am proud!” exclaimed Mrs Erskine, “and which you must see–my golf course!”

“She had her carriage called, and drove me over her estate, which consists of six hundred and eighty acres — one of the most beautiful estates in that very beautiful section. We drove past her tennis-courts, past cottages, which she herself has designed, past an old cabin built in 1771 and still in good repair, and then came out on Holly Hills Valley, in which lies the golf course. A course of nine holes, its very situation makes its extension impossible, but it is one of the best nine-hole golf courses imaginable. Around the valley in which it lies, and entirely occupies, Mrs Erskine has built a three-mile driveway, no small piece of work in itself. But Mrs Erskine’s energy and ability are almost unlimited.”

 

 

In 1923 Bert Leonard left a well established and successful Tryon Country Club, probably lured by the fact that a new highway was being built from South Carolina to Tryon and up through the Pacolet Valley to Hendersonville.  He built a home in the area along the Pacolet that was then known as “Valhalla,” next to what later became Harmon Field, opened a grocery store and tourist cabins, and continued his involvement in the golf business by selling equipment, and  laying out and building new golf courses at Rutherfordton, and elsewhere in the region.

 

Leonard built the area’s first geometrically shaped “miniature golf course” on his Pacolet Valley property, and named it “Leonard’s Lucky Links.”  It and a “tea ground” for refreshments became a popular destination for area residents and tourists.  He served as Justice of the Peace for Tryon Township, and was appointed Postmaster for the Valhalla Post Office, which was located at Leonard’s Grocery.

 

Bert Leonard died on January 13, 1950 at his home in Tryon at age 69.  Pallbearers at his funeral included Francis P. Bacon, one of the founders of Tryon Country Club, and Carroll P. Rogers, son-in-law of Emma Payne Erskine.  Ms. Erskine had passed away in 1924.  In 2011, Tryon Country Club historian Jane Templeton, said of Robert A. “Bert” Leonard, “…certainly there is a good case that he is the reason for golf in the foothills.”

 

– Submitted by Alan C. Leonard, grandson of Robert Albert “Bert” Leonard