There’s nothing but weeds today on a large part of Fort George Island. If you look closely (and know where to look,) you can see a tee here, a green there.
One of the area’s first courses, Fort George Golf Club is now gone, leaving the pristine island off Heckscher Drive in North Jacksonville to its few residents.
The original nine was built around 1927, possibly by the famed Donald Ross. The avid golfers who formed The Donald Ross Society list it as his work though others claim it was done by a St. Augustine man named Maurice Fatio.
It was built to serve wealthy Northerners who came to the island for vacations. At the time, the wealthiest were along “Millionaire’s Row” on Jekyll Island in South Georgia and developers thought that Fort George could attract a similar crowd. A clubhouse was built and a few wealthy folk came to build homes, but it turned out to be too remote and never reached Jekyll’s level.
Thus, the island became residential and the golf course was a semi-private club.
Nine holes were added in 1968. Paul Reinhold, the head of the family that owned the course and considerable acreage on the island, was one of a group which did the design and it was called the “American Nine,” with the original getting the name “European Nine.”
The two were vastly different. The new nine was more of a modern look with wide fairways and long holes; the original was tight with shorter holes.
The person most identified with the golf course would be Jim Kuhn, who served as pro from 1974 until it was sold in 1985.
“I was the pro at what is now Deerfield Lakes and the owner was a guy from Miami who didn’t know anything about golf,” said Kuhn. “We had only one greens mower and it broke, and he asked if that really was a piece of equipment we needed. I figured I needed to work somewhere else.”
At the time, Fort George needed a pro.
“I talked with a member of the Reinhold family, which owned it, and got the job. The place was in pretty rough shape and I thought it could be a marketable place if it was run properly,” said Kuhn.
Kuhn remembers it as a ”great” course with some of the best holes in the area.
“The last four were spectacular,” he said. “The par 4 was tight, then you had a tight par 5 that could be reached, but not without risk.
“The 17th was a par 3 with the green maybe 60-70 feet above the tee. The 18th tee was on the same hill, which was called Mount Cornelius, and you were so high up that you could see the tops of the trees. It was a great par 4.”
The tee still has a distinction; there’s a plaque noting that it’s the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard south of Wilmington, Del.
The prices were right and it was common for tourists staying at the pricey Amelia Island Plantation to come to Fort George for a $15 round.
The demise started when the giant Fairfield company bought out Reinhold’s interests and announced it would build over 1,000 residential units on the island.
Then, as now, there were a considerable number of people with homes on the island and they reacted quickly. Led by contractor William E. Arnold of The Arnold Company, they pulled every string possible to tangle Fairfield in a maze of regulatory problems, questioning everything from the water supply to the problem of having so many people on a place with just one small road leading in and out.
Arnold and his followers said that the property never should be developed and, with considerable legislative help, the land was bought by the state. Today, it’s returning to the wilderness it once was.