Devereux Emmet

Devereux Emmet was a golf course architect, born on December 11, 1861 at Pelham in New York. He graduated from Columbia University in 1883. He began laying out courses in the closing years of the nineteenth century, as the game was taking hold in America, and he built a great many of them in the northeastern United States, above all on Long Island in New York. Schuyler Meadows Club in New York State says that in the course of his life he designed more than 150 courses around the world.

One of his early works is Island Golf Links, out of which Garden City Golf Club on Long Island grew. It opened on May 29, 1897 as nine holes for the guests of the Garden City Hotel and became Garden City Golf Club in 1899. The course was afterwards reworked by Walter Travis, a founder member, who took a hand to the greens and the bunkering. In 1909 Emmet designed Leatherstocking Golf Course at Cooperstown in New York. In 1923 he laid out the course at Lenox Hills Country Club, which later became the Green Course at Bethpage State Park, and in 1924 the Blue Course at Congressional Country Club, which opened at Bethesda in Maryland. The Blue Course was remodelled by Robert Trent Jones Sr. in 1957 and by Rees Jones in 1989 and 2006, but since 2019 a restoration under Andrew Green has been taking it back to Emmet’s design of 1924. He also designed Pelham Country Club in his native Pelham, completed in 1921, and Schuyler Meadows Club at Loudonville in New York, completed in 1927.

In 1924 he took on the architect Alfred H. Tull, and in 1929 he made him a partner and set up the design office of Emmet, Emmet and Tull. The two men worked together until Emmet’s death at Garden City in New York on December 30, 1934. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Emmet.

See the other golf course architects here.