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Talamore at Oak Terrace - Club
History
James W. Hilty
XI. Location, Location, Location.
Oak Terrace's survival was constantly threatened by
suburban Philadelphia's rising real estate market.
Horsham Township, after experiencing no growth at all
during the 1930s, saw a slight influx of commerce after
the war and then a substantial, 200 percent increase
between 1950 and 1970. Commercial growth spawned an
increased demand for housing. Rising real estate values
were tempting, and Harry and Elsie Wingel spoke often of
cashing in and selling the Oak Terrace property.
 The
Wingels had done little to improve either the course or
the club facilities, and members were painfully aware of
the club's tenuous status. In 1952, to insure continued
operation of Oak Terrace its members persuaded the
Wingels to grant them a long-term lease, and the members
themselves took over club operations, electing their own
officers, taking charge of tournaments, and managing
club facilities. Exact terms of the lease are unknown,
but in 1964, when Harry Wingel attempted to solicit
buyers for Oak Terrace, club president Wallace Stitz
told newspaper reporters that the members still had
fourteen years to run on their lease. Stitz said that
any sale, according to legal counsel, was contingent on
the lease. “We feel that it's a good lease,” said one
member. “And we expect to be golfing here another 14
years.”
Oak Terrace scraped by, relying on resident members to
take care of small repairs and most of the maintenance
around the club. Unable to afford professional services
or outside contractors, members contributed their own
labor, even to the point of rebuilding the eighteenth
green, moving the earth and sculpting and shaping the
new green themselves. Bernie Waddell, elected club vice
president in 1965, recalls that the members also dredged
the pond on the thirteenth hole, painted buildings, and
performed other major chores around the club.
Oak Terrace managed to retain its membership in the Golf
Association of Philadelphia, and a few members, such as
Malcolm “Max” Strow the Temple University golf coach,
excelled in GAP tournaments. For several years, the
popular Wally Paul served as the club professional and
his brother, Pete DePalentino dominated club
championships. The club also continued to provide dining
and dancing in a convivial atmosphere, as well as
reasonably priced golf.
In the 1960s Oak Terrace's members began drifting away
to other area clubs, such as North Hills, LuLu, and two
new clubs, Cedarbrook and Squires. Cedarbrook, which
since 1921 had been located at Limekiln Pike and
Cheltenham Avenue, decided in 1961 to move to its
present location along Penllyn Pike in Blue Bell. The
new Cedarbrook course, designed by William F. Mitchell,
opened for play in June 1962. Two years later, Squires
Golf Club opened across McKean Road from Oak Terrace.
Built on the 147 acres of rolling terrain that were once
Henry McKean Ingersoll's estate, Squires was designed by
renowned architect George Fazio, a Norristown native,
who intended the course originally to be available for
public play. However, Herman Watkins and a group of
investors purchased the course from Fazio for $525,000
and offered a limited number of memberships reserved
exclusively for “gentlemen” golfers. Squires' all-male
membership quickly laid claim to several innovative
sartorial informalities, including, among others, to be
the first to wear shorts on a golf course in the U.S.
Expanding population and commercial growth made Horsham
and the area around Oak Terrace highly desirable for
residential real estate development. The first
successful venture occurred in 1955 with the building of
Oak Terrace Farms, a small community of forty-four
mostly split-level single-family homes situated on the
35-acre tract once owned by the McKeans and more
recently by John Nesbitt. Entry into Oak Terrace Farms
from Welsh Road on Oak Terrace Drive is approximately
200 yards east of Talamore's main entrance and about
five-tenths of a mile west of Tennis Avenue. Talamore's
eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth holes are
routed around Oak Terrace Farms. To create additional
lots for houses the developers of Oak Terrace farms
substantially diverted Park Creek creating a flood plain
that in heavy rains swells the creek and carries quite a
lot of water past Talamore's eighth and ninth holes,
taxing the golf course run-off systems.
Two other real estate development plans, one rather
modest and the other quite ambitious, never succeeded.
Nor did the Catholic Archdiocese's plan to use the
property for a cemetery. All three plans envisioned
expansion well beyond the bounds of Oak Terrace Country
Club.
To this point we have concentrated largely on the former
McKean estate and the Oak Terrace parcels. Let us now
consider the other half of the Talamore property, the
considerable chunk (approximately 189 acres) of Talamore
that lies east of the main entrance, that borders
against Oak Terrace Farms, and that connects through to
Tennis Avenue. Today this section of Talamore contains
most of the back nine of the golf course, plus a
substantial portion of Talamore's housing stock. By the
1960s this particular parcel garnered significant
attention because of its potential value as a
residential development. Among those seeking to develop
the land were E. A. van Steenwyk and Herbert Barness.
In 1946 E. A. van Steenwyk, founder and first president
of the Philadelphia Blue Cross, and his wife, Marion
purchased a 70-acre parcel, called “Reddy Run Farm."
Once the site of H. P. McKean's piggery, today it
engrosses Talamore's sixteenth and seventeenth holes and
the surrounding homes. The sixteenth green now rests
where the "Reddy Run" farmstead once stood.
The van Steenwyks later purchased two adjacent parcels
as investments. In 1954 they bought 89.6 acres fronting
on Tennis Avenue, which included the site of Rowland
Hugh's house and H. P. McKean's “Cold Spring Farm.” In
February 1956 the van Steenwyks purchased 29 acres along
McKean Road, being the same 29 acres Elsie Wingel split
off from Oak Terrace in October 1954.
Van Steenwyk's farm and pastureland covered the area
that today contains Talamore's fourteenth, fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth holes and the townhouses on
Stoneham Court, Woodbrook Drive, Marsten Green Court,
Leamington Court, and Kingstown Court. When Oak Terrace
Farms was developed in 1955 on adjacent land, van
Steenwyk considered and turned down separate development
plans offered by the Fox Brothers of Abington and from
James Bush-Brown, the noted landscape architect who
lived across McKean Road (opposite Talamore's third
tee).
Mr. van Steenwyk died in 1962, leaving his wife and son,
John with three mortgages and no real prospects.
Pressured by the trust company settling his father's
estate to put up the 188.6 acres for auction, John van
Steenwyk approached the Montgomery County Planning
Commission for advice. Arthur F. Loeben, director of the
Montgomery County Planning Commission recommended
selling the land for a “cluster development” of an open
space residential community. Loeben assisted van
Steenwyk in preparing illustrative sketches for a
200-homesite development plan titled "Four Fields" and
helped gain passage of an ordinance to permit the
development. When details of the plan were publicized,
residents of Oak Terrace Farms organized to block the
development. The van Steenwyks mulled over and rejected
lowball offers from the Levitt Brothers and George Fazio
(who proposed a golf course community) and then
abandoned hopes of developing the property themselves.
In 1968 Marion van Steenwyk sold the property to Herbert
Barness, exempting two parcels from the sale. One parcel
of six-acres contained the Rowland Hugh house (next to
Talamore's fourteenth green), which the van Steenwyks
considered historically significant and wished to spare
from demolition. In 1968 Mrs. van Steenwyk moved into
the house, remaining there until her death in 1976. It
is now the residence of her son, John. Mrs. van Steenwyk
sold the remaining ten-acre parcel (919 Tennis Avenue)
to the Episcopal Church Foundation, as the site for St.
Matthew's Episcopal Church.
Herbert Barness (1923-1998), a highly successful,
politically well-connected Bucks County developer, also
encountered community resistance, and his development
plan stalled and eventually collapsed. On August 18,
1969 Barness sold 173 acres to the Philadelphia
Archdiocese for $852,990. Ten days later, Elsie Wingel
(by then widowed), sold Oak Terrace at Oak Terrace (188.7
acres) to John Cardinal Krol and the Archdiocese of
Philadelphia for $995,000.
Details of the Archdiocese's intentions are murky. Area
residents believe the Archdiocese planned to use the van
Steenwyk and Wingel properties as a cemetery and to
convert the former McKean mansion into cemetery offices,
a retreat house or possibly a convent.
One need not be a geologist to know that substantial
portions of the land purchased by the Archdiocese were
too wet for burial grounds. A portion of Oak Terrace was
on high ground, but two forks of Park Creek meandered
through the property, plus other sections contained
wetlands and several underground springs. Indeed, the
underground springs in the area were so volubly
productive that Henry Pratt McKean built a water tower
and pipeline to carry spring water over 4,000 feet from
"Cold Springs Farm" (next to Talamore's fourteenth
green) to the manor house. In the 1920s Eugene Coho
purchased "Cold Spring Farm" from McKean's estate and
established the Sunbeam Water Company. Coho's successful
water bottling business drew water from the spring next
to the old Hugh house and operated until 1976.
Either the Archdiocese was woefully ill advised about
the water problems or they purchased the properties as a
real estate investment. No lasting evidence of the
Archdiocese's use of the ground for a cemetery survives
today. A few persons say they recall that the Church
consecrated the ground and commenced burials, but no
markers were erected and no graves were uncovered during
construction of either the homes or the golf course.
Still, rumors circulated long afterwards, leading some
Talamore residents to wonder what (or who) lay beneath
their homes. One day in 2003 Jodi Pollock, a Fulwell
Court resident thought she had found a “grave marker” in
her backyard. She discovered a cemetery-type stone
bearing the name “Donnie DeLaurentis.” Jodi was
comforted to learn that the marker was not a gravestone.
Rather, it was a tribute marker placed near the old Oak
Terrace's first green sometime in the late 1980s by
Donnie's golfing buddies to honor his memory and mark
the spot where DeLaurentis suffered a fatal heart
attack. (The marker may also have salved the consciences
of Donnie's playing partners who reportedly delayed
their round of golf only long enough to wait for an
ambulance to remove Donnie). The DeLaurentis marker,
moved about by heavy equipment during golf course
construction, ended in Mrs. Pollock's backyard by
happenstance.
Whatever the Archdiocese planned for the property, they
apparently were in no hurry, because they honored the
lease arrangement with the Oak Terrace members and
allowed the club to continue for another ten years, or
until the 1978 expiration date declared by Wallace Stitz
back in 1964. A few remarkably dedicated members, led by
Dick Pierce, continued to run the club, and somehow it
survived on a season-to-season basis. Dick Pierce, Max
Fisher, Bernie Waddell, and other club officers were
sometimes required to sign promissory notes to finance
club operations pending receipt of members' dues. Yet
somehow the course remained open for play.
Services and facilities fell into neglect. The manor
house was essentially abandoned, and the carriage house
became the clubhouse proper. Eventually the golf
operation turned to daily-fee play to cover operating
and maintenance costs. Following the 1971 season, Oak
Terrace effectively forfeited its status as a private
club and dropped out of the Golf Association of
Philadelphia. Having once aspired to be one of the top
private clubs and courses in the Philadelphia district,
Oak Terrace now hoped only to survive.
Chapters
I. Earliest History
II. Pine Run Farms - The McKean Estate
III. McKean Manor House - Pine Ridge
IV. Horace Trumbauer and Talamore at Oak Terrace
V. Scandal and the Declension of the McKeans
VI. Pine Run Country Club and Alexander Findlay
-- Brushing Against Golf Immortality
VII. Bankers' and the Great Depression.
VIII. Oak Terrace - The Wingel Years
IX. The “Old Oak”.
X. “Slammin' Sammy” Snead Comes to Oak Terrace.
XI. Location, Location, Location
XII. Oak Terrace - The “Bud” Hansen
Years.
XIII. Talamore at Oak Terrace - Realen and Bob Levy,
Jr.
XIV. Talamore at Oak Terrace: The making of a golf
course
XV. The switchover, 1993-1995:
XVI. THE END OF THE BEGINNING |
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