Seth Raynor

Seth Raynor, in full Seth Jagger Raynor, was a golf course architect, born on May 7, 1874 at Manorville on Long Island, New York. He studied civil engineering at Princeton University but left in 1898 without taking a degree, settled at Southampton on Long Island and worked there as a surveyor. Unusually for a golf course architect, he barely played the game himself and is said never to have become any good at it. Having no ball flight of his own to design around is held to be part of what gave his work its own character.

The turn came in 1908. He was given the survey of the ground for the National Golf Links of America, the course Charles Blair Macdonald had in mind, and the quality of that work led to his being put in charge of the construction as well. The National was completed in 1911. Raynor went on as Macdonald’s right hand, directing the building of some fifteen courses, among them Piping Rock Club in New York State and Mid Ocean Club in Bermuda. In 1914, at the age of forty, he set up a design office of his own, and when Macdonald withdrew from front-line work he took over his clients as well.

Raynor’s design carried on the thinking behind the template holes Macdonald had held up as the ideal. He took the principles of celebrated British and European holes, the Redan, the Biarritz, the Eden and the Short, and remade them to suit the ground in front of him. What is curious is that Raynor had never once seen the courses those originals stood on. He worked from drawings and measurements, in the manner of the surveyor he was, and greens with a geometric outline and bunkers with square, sharply cut faces are still the mark of a Raynor course. Among his best-known works are Yale Golf Course in Connecticut (opened in 1926, with Macdonald advising), Shoreacres in Illinois, Camargo in Ohio, Mountain Lake in Florida and Waialae Country Club in Hawaii.

Fishers Island Club in New York State is held to be the summit of his work, and he did not live to see it finished. In January 1926, while staying at West Palm Beach in Florida, he fell ill with pneumonia and died on the 23rd at the age of fifty-one. Fishers Island opened half a year later, in July 1926. The work he left behind was carried on by his assistant Charles Banks. Raynor himself wrote almost nothing about design, but the courses he produced in little more than a decade of work are still held in high regard as the classics of their school.

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