Golf clubs across America in the early 1900s were frequently governed by fair-complected men who rolled their Rs, said aye and nae and wee, and spoke fondly of The Macallan and a dish from their homeland made of sheep’s innards.

Here in the Sandhills, the memory of Donald Ross, a native of Dornoch on the northeast coast of Scotland, is revered.

Hope Valley Country Club in Durham is 100 years old and has had a member of the Crichton family from Monifieth on its golf shop payroll every single day of its existence. That’s right — some 36,500 days (plus leap years) of paying Marshall and his offspring David and Maggie.

Other early Scotsmen who moved to America to carve a career in the golf business and landed in the Carolinas were Ralph Miner of New Bern Country Club, David Ferguson at Greenville (S.C.) Country Club, and Frank Clark of Asheville Country Club and later Biltmore Forest Country Club.

“You had to listen carefully,” Greenville golfer Heyward Sullivan said of Ferguson. “He talked through a thick burr. He used to say, ‘Laddie, the short game will help your long game, nay the long game will never help the short game.’ He wanted you to practice chipping and putting.” 

Hope Valley member Joe Robb once said of Marshall Crichton, the club’s first pro when it opened with a Ross-designed course in 1926: “A Scotsman replete with a brogue, bandy legs, a caustic tongue and a terrific sense of humor. Marshall’s brogue was so thick that his cuss words often sounded like music.”

One of the most fascinating stories of Scotsmen coming to America was that of the Findlay brothers — Alex and Fred. There were eight boys in the Findlay family of Montrose, and all of them learned to play golf. Alex was the oldest and in 1886 became the first golfer to ever post a 72 in competition. The next winter he left Scotland for America at the behest of fellow Montrose resident Edward Millar, who had established Merchiston Ranch near Fullerton in Nebraska in February 1887.

The so-called “Apple Tree Gang” at St. Andrew’s Golf Club in Yonkers, New York, is roundly credited with playing the first game of golf in America in February 1888. In truth, Alex Findlay had laid out a six-hole course at Merchiston Ranch by April 1887, played it with clubs he brought from Scotland, and sought to spread the virtues of golf in the Wild, Wild West. Some said as the game grew in popularity that he was the “Father of American Golf.”

“The people round about used to come and laugh at us for running after a white ball,” Findlay said in a 1926 interview with the London Evening Standard. “But at length I asked them to have a game and soon afterwards they were all keen to play. Before very long a golf club had been formed and the first steps to making America a golfing country had been taken.”

Meanwhile, Fred moved to Australia in 1909 with his wife in search of a warmer climate for their son, Freddie, who suffered from tuberculosis. Fred soon found work as head pro and course superintendent at Metropolitan Golf Club and stayed there for 14 years. Unfortunately, his son died at a young age despite the advantages of the warmer climate. Findlay’s daughter met a young man from Richmond, Virginia, who had served in the Navy during World War I and traveled to Australia as a merchant seaman.

Ruth Findlay married Raymond “Ben” Loving in 1924. They moved to Richmond and Fred followed them. Findlay knew Australian golfers Joe Kirkwood and Victor East, who had ventured to the States to play golf and give exhibitions, and both spoke highly of the New World and the opportunity for an accomplished golfer. His brother Alex cabled him from America, “Come at once.” 

“I came to Richmond to visit my daughter,” Fred said. “They were talking about building a course there. I loved the game, and I was interested in anything that would make an honest dollar.”

Findlay quickly established himself as a talented golf architect in the mid-Atlantic region. Though his career would not prove as prolific as that of Ross, who is credited with some 385 course designs in the eastern United States, he was “the man” in the state of Virginia, designing some 40 courses.

One of his early works that remains today is the James River Course at the Country Club of Virginia, in Richmond. He took 14 holes from a plan drawn by William Flynn and added four more, and supervised the construction of the course that opened in 1928. The collaboration certainly worked out well, as the James River course was the venue for the 1955 and 1975 U.S. Amateur Championships.

His most revered and solo design opened one year later — Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville. Findlay made his first visit to the site just west of the campus of the University of Virginia in September 1927, and the course opened two years later.

Findlay was given a special piece of ground when a group of Charlottesville business leaders decreed the town should have a sports and social club. The site had been under the purview of 13 owners over nearly two centuries, dating to 1744, when King George II of England conveyed 4,753 acres to Michael Holland of Hanover County. A manor house built in 1785 and expanded in 1803 under plans drawn by President Thomas Jefferson would be refurbished and expanded to serve as the clubhouse.

Findlay surveyed the misty mountain range to the north and west that would one day become the Shenandoah National Park. He traversed the slopes and hollows and in his mind pictured the flight of a golf ball cracked from his wooden-shafted mashie, soaring through the crystalline air and across a winding brook. He scanned the hillsides and factored the flow of fairways amid the Scotch broom running rampant.

“I just walk around and commune with nature in her visible forms,” Findlay said of his process. “And then, as if by inspiration alone, it comes to me suddenly, and I see the finished course far more plainly and vividly than if it were charted on cold blueprint paper. It has a character. And then I set out to make it what I have dreamed of — to materialize my vision. Nature herself gives me most of my ideas.”

Loving helped his father-in-law build the course and stayed on for half a century as the club’s general manager. After years living in Richmond, Fred moved back to Charlottesville and spent his later years playing golf, fishing, hunting and painting.

Newspaperman Ross Valentine wrote of Findlay at age 90 in October 1961: “To see Fred Findlay, clear-eyed, lean-muscled and fit as a fiddle on the eve of his 90th birthday, with whipcord and steel wrists hit a golf ball straight down the middle, was inspiring.”

Findlay immersed himself in the idyllic settings of Farmington and the surrounding countryside, capturing many in paintings that hang in the clubhouse today. The Findlay Room is decorated with three scenes from the 1950s and early ’60s — one of the third hole of the golf course and two with pastures, distant mountains and the lakes where he frequently cast a fishing line.

Findlay died on March 9, 1966, at age 94, in a Charlottesville nursing home, where he had recently moved following a period of declining health.

“Aye, Laddie,” the old Scotsman said, “if I had my life to live again, I wouldna’ change one day. The world owes me na’thing. My life has been coupled with nature, and I am sure there is nothing that keeps one closer to God.”