This article is reprinted with permission from the Nagle Design Works The Pressroom February newsletter. See link at end for video on restorative projct.
Orchard Park Country Club, just south of Buffalo in western New York, was founded in 1946, but its course is significantly older: it was designed by Walter Travis, three-times US Amateur champion, in 1916, for the Park Country Club of Buffalo, which had been created in 1903. In 1926, the club decided to move to a new site closer to town, and Hugh Alison, partner of Harry Colt, designed its new course in Williamsville. Orchard Park continued as a ‘summer course’ for club members until the year after World War Two, when it became a separate club, which it remains.
Over the years, Orchard Park has been worked on by several architects, and it has lost a lot of its Travis features and stylings.
“As early as the 1950s, the club employed a local landscape architect who made significant changes to the course, though not, at that time, to the routing,” Jim says. “Originally, the club’s practice field was not adjacent to the clubhouse; the seventeenth tee was, and the hole played directly away from the house, with the eighteenth obviously coming back. In the 1980s, the club decided to use the land of those two holes to make a new range, and constructed two new holes – now the fifth and thirteenth – and a new green for the sixth hole, which previously had been right at the edge of the property, next to a road which, by that time, had become busy. The new fifth was a par five that demanded a double layup, and never fit the course, and the new thirteenth was a short four with quite a lot of earthmoving, also a poor fit.”
Since then, the club has made several attempts to restore back to a Travis look and feel, but never really followed through, except on some small projects. “The club’s present leadership is determined, this time, to do restoration properly,” says Jim. Orchard Park therefore hired the new Nagle Design Works in mid-2024, and since then, Jim has been hard at work on a plan for the restoration.
“The masterplan is complete, and has been approved by members,” he says “It will go out to bid this spring, with the intention to start work in coming years. The club has an aerial photograph from 1927, which served as the inspiration for the plan. As anyone who has seen Travis's courses will know, his features, especially bunkers and mounding, are rather abrupt. At Orchard Park, the greens are less severe than on many other Travis courses; the plan calls for them to be enlarged back to their original outlines. In many of the bunkers, the sand area was quite small, and the surrounding mounds dominate, making them, in some cases, too hard to play from. Many of the bunkers will be enlarged, to make them more playable, while retaining the characteristic surrounding mounds. The plan emphasizes the holes’ strategy, interrupting the line of play in some holes, with either bunkers or mounds.
“At some point, not long after opening, the club eliminated Travis’s ‘Great Hazard’ on the twelfth hole – four bunkers forming the corners of a square in the landing zone of the hole, with gentle mounds and swales in the fairway – on the twelfth hole. The second and third holes will be joined to create a new par five, but the par three second has been scanned by GreenScan 3D and will be replicated in its original form in the first part of the fairway of the present fifth hole. The new fifth will be a short park four inspired by Travis’s Cape Arundel.”
Video on Restorative Project
