If you tell a friend that you’ll meet him “on the first tee at Ponte Vedra,” you need to be more specific.
Oak Bridge has changed its name. It’s now Ponte Vedra Golf and Country Club at Sawgrass, the fourth name in the course’s 30-year history.
The confusion comes with the name of one of the area’s oldest clubs, the nearby Ponte Vedra Inn and Club.
“The management decided to make a change in the name,” said Oak Bridge pro Tommy Aycock.
The owner of the original Ponte Vedra, Herb Peyton, wasn’t aware of the name change when asked at last month’s Gate Invitational. He referred questions to the PV general manager, Dale Haney, who said “We’ll look into it. I don’t know if anything can be done.”
The “new” Ponte Vedra was built in 1970 as part of a trailer park called Thousand Oaks. The area was upgraded to housing and the name was changed to Innlet Beach, and it became Oak Bridge in 1987 after an Ed Seay redesign to lengthen it and bring it to its present configuration.
The original Ponte Vedra opened in 1922 and the club’s name predates the area’s name. The original developer was the National Lead Company, which mined in the area, and the legend is that one of the company owners read that Christopher Columbus was born in Pontevedra, Spain, and liked the name. (What he read was wrong. Had the man had an accurate history book, it’s possible that the area now would be named Genoa, after the Italian city where Columbus was born.)
The name now is applied to the area from the St. Johns/Duval county line down to the Guana River park and west to the Intracoastal Waterway.