A masterplan of masters’ plans

“Epic,” says golf course architect Tim Lewis, and it’s difficult to argue. We are looking out at a rock outcropping that guards the second green of the nine-hole layout at Cohasse Country Club in Southbridge, Massachusetts. 

“Modern courses are often man-made landscapes,” continues Lewis. “Folks tend to tame the whole site. The old masters collaborated with nature.”

In this case, those old masters include Donald Ross and the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, and a 75-acre site that is slated for the National Historic Registry. The club’s member-owned arrangement, which has struggled to thrive over many years, lasted until 15 March 2025.

Ken Uracius, a builder whose sole focus is historic property renovation, purchased the property and will include a public option for play for the first time in its history. While work on restoring the Ross Tavern is already under way, Uracius has hired Lewis to return the course to its original intentions.

Ross lived and worked in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the period when he designed, among others, the courses at Tatnuck Country Club (1913) and Worcester Country Club (1914). He personally supervised design and construction during that time and would have done so at Cohasse (designed 1916, opened 1918). But Cohasse’s pedigree does not end with Ross.

“The influence of the Olmsteds is special,” says Lewis, noting that with the help of town librarian Margaret Morrissey, he has the 1930s correspondence between the Olmsted firm and then owners – the Wells family. A student of landscape architecture at Cornell, Lewis is comfortable talking about native plants and trees and rematriation of the land.

Read more: ‘Let us now praise famous men’, from the July 2022 issue of GCA, profiles the work of Ross and the Olmsted brothers at Cohasse.

Lewis is also comfortable with collaboration, as the plan to bring Cohasse back will be a team effort, a team that includes superintendent Frank Kulig and PGA professional Greg Farland.

“There wasn’t a day in my career I didn’t think of Cohasse,” says Farland, who grew up playing the course, mowing its greens, and dreaming of a golf life that would eventually span nearly four decades. At age 60, he has returned to where he first learned the game – a place where he once played with his grandmother Rita, caddied for his dad Jack, and later watched his daughter Grace win club championships.

Given the excellence and historical knowledge of Farland and Kulig, much of the work will be in-house. “Frank and Greg will be the boots on the ground,” says Lewis. “They are the ones who will make the plan come to life.”

Like Farland, Kulig is also a seasoned pro who knows New England grasses and weather and, as he puts it, “embraces poa”. He’s up for the task of balancing the various grasses and understory plantings Lewis has planned.

On that note, Cohasse is a welcoming palette. Tree clearing, so much a focus for recent renovations at many clubs, is not needed at Cohasse. The course has kept its original routing for more than a century, and the club’s owners along the way never went in for planting trees. This means design plans can drill down into finer points of Ross and Olmsted’s designs.

And while it’s ‘au current’ to go against the 20th century man-made landscapes, Cohasse has a pedigree burned onto native ground. The holes convey a sense of history. The holes dance in and around a rugged, New England landscape. And where some older courses indicate golf was a ground game, Ross’s 1916 layout at Cohasse makes it clear – with the rocks on hole two a good example – you had to get the ball into the air in the old days as well.

As we pore over an aerial from 1938, Lewis points out that over time the greens have become circular and the bunkers smaller and narrower. In some ways, these changes give the grounds crew less options.

“We want to reestablish the square greens, the bigger greens,” says Lewis. “They are more inviting for the average players but also give pin placements to challenge the better players.” Lewis’s initial plans for hole one involves turning a smallish, circular green back to an original diamond shape.

And Lewis is particularly keen to emphasise the involvement of the Olmsted firm. “It’s a reminder to consider not just the golf course, but the landscape in which the golf course is embedded,” he says.

Lewis notes some nearby examples, such as Franklin Park, which sits in Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, the series of parks draped around the city of Boston; early golf courses were not profoundly different from park spaces or natural areas. The advent of wall-to-wall irrigation systems and the improvement of maintenance technology brought about courses removed from their natural origins. Today’s designers and renovators are re-embracing geologic shapes and contours. Cohasse will be the perfect palette for this new-old work.

“There’s a tendency these days toward denuding a property,” says Lewis. “We will be trying to restore, with a focus on forest edges.” The goal will be to create seasonal and flowering mature edges with understory trees. Lewis also hopes to create transition zones for flora and fauna between the mature forests and dry/wet meadows of the open golf course.

“This park land idea was a common component of the Olmsted planting style,” says Lewis, “And something the Olmsted brothers directly mentioned in their correspondence with Channing Wells, the original owner and developer of Cohasse in 1916.”

Working towards restoring the natural lines between the golf course and the landscape it inhabits, Lewis is intent on honouring original intentions of two of the giants of course and landscape design. The team of Lewis, Kulig, Farland and Uracius will balance a thriving golf operation with the fine work of restoring an enduring and cherished layout. The course opened for play in April.

“We’ve had some traffic,” Farland says in a happy tone. Those of us that have long admired Cohasse from the outside looking in, now have the option to play upon a master’s plan.

Mark Wagner is the author of ‘Native Links: The Surprising History of Our First People in Golf’ (published in 2024 by Back Nine Press) and was a finalist for the Herbert Warren Wind Award.  

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