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Organized 1900 · ground sold 1911
The club: Mishawaka's first country club stood where the city's golf stands now. The St. Joe Valley Country Club was organized in 1900 and laid out nine holes on sixty-five acres of the river-bluff property north of the Lincolnway that Frederick G. Eberhart would later buy and give the city. The club played its ground for a decade; in 1911 the land was sold out from under it, and the St. Joe Valley club's course passed to other hands. No architect for the nine holes is named in any record reached, and none is supplied here. The club's own records — a charter, a membership roll, a clubhouse account — have not been reached; its documented course is the ground's course, and the ground is documented because of what stood on it next.
A name that will not join: The record of the bluff carries a second name alongside the first, and the two do not join. A golf-history account of the Eberhart property, drawn from the period newspapers, reports that a South Bend Country Club was "organized in 1900" — an Indianapolis newspaper of that year carried the South Bend Country Club's incorporation, dated 25 January 1900 — and that by 1902 a course stood "near Mishawaka on the St. Joseph's river," and it proposes, as a hypothesis only, that the names form one line: a South Bend Country Club that became the St. Joe Valley Country Club on the Mishawaka ground. The records reached do not make that join. A country club incorporated under South Bend's name in January 1900 and a St. Joe Valley Country Club organized on Mishawaka ground the same year may be one body renamed, two bodies, or a South Bend club playing across the river in Mishawaka; the newspapers and the deed books that would settle it have not been read for this question. Both names are therefore printed as they stand, separately, and the hypothesis is printed as a hypothesis.
Sources:
- The Eberhart-Petro course history as carried in the Parks & River section of this build — the golf-history forum record (Golf Club Atlas) citing the period newspapers and the Eberhart Mansion's own account: St. Joe Valley Country Club organized 1900, nine holes on 65 acres, land sold 1911; the "south bend country club" organization reports of 1900 and the 1902 course notice, with the renaming offered there as a hypothesis.