The Miami Country Club, 1916–1920 — and the directory that keeps it alive in 1921

Opened May 1916 · closed 1920, on one record · listed with officers, 1921, on another

The club: In May 1916 a second country club opened on the same bluff property: the Miami Country Club. It played the ground four years. In 1920 the club closed, and Frederick G. Eberhart bought the property — the purchase that begins the ground's public course, for Eberhart in time donated the course to the city, keeping a bluff plot for the mansion he built above it. The Miami club is the last private body to hold the bluff; everything that follows on that ground is the city's.

The conflict, printed whole: Against that closing stands the city's own directory. The 1921 Polk directory of South Bend and Mishawaka, in its Mishawaka clubs list, carries the club as a going concern with a full slate of officers — a president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer are named — and places it not on the bluff at all but "two miles east of Mishawaka," at Lincoln Way East and North Byrkit Avenue. The directory's text as digitized reads the name "Miami County Club"; the golf record's name for the bluff club is Miami Country Club, and the directory entry is taken to be the same club under a garbled name. The two records cannot both be the whole story. The club may have closed on the bluff in 1920 and removed east, and played on; the directory, canvassed ahead of publication, may have carried a club already dead; or the golf record's 1920 closing date may be a year or more early. No record reached settles which, and none is chosen here. What is documented is both: a Miami Country Club that opened on the Eberhart bluff in May 1916, and a club of that name listed with officers at Lincoln Way East and Byrkit Avenue in 1921. The settling records are named in this section's gaps: the Tribune's sports pages for 1916–1925 and the county deed books for both grounds.

Sources:

1. The Eberhart-Petro course history in the Parks & River section — the golf-history forum record citing the period newspapers: Miami Country Club opened on the property May 1916, closed 1920, the ground then bought by Frederick G. Eberhart.
2. R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory, 1921, Mishawaka section, "Clubs" — the club listed at Lincoln Way E. and N. Byrkit Ave. with four named officers (the president's surname as digitized is uncertain and is not relied on); read first-hand.