Known today as Stow Acres Country Club, the legacy of the Stow, Massachusetts golf course goes back to the early 1900s. Opened in 1926 as a nine-hole course, Mapledale Country Club, as it was then called, was among the earliest Black country clubs in the country.

The 196-acre Randall Estate, with its twenty-room mansion, was purchased by Robert Hawkins, a local Black entrepreneur, who featured golf, horseback riding and tennis at the newly created club. Hawkins, an avid golfer, had caddied growing up in Massachusetts and Vermont and later became the general manager of Sandy Burr Country Club in Wayland, Massachusetts—the first Black man to hold that position. It was there that the idea of owning his own country club for Blacks was born.

With Mapledale Country Club Hawkins’ dream was realized. Dr. George Adams and Dr. Albert Harris, two “Negro” physicians from Washington, DC, in search of a course on which to play the game they loved, traveled frequently in summer to New England’s Mapledale Country Club. These same physicians were instrumental in helping organize the first official national golf competition the course hosted for black golfers. The 72-hole, two-day tournament was held on September 4th and 5th at the Stow, Massachusetts course and sponsored by the newly-organized United Golfers Association. At a time when blacks were not allowed to play golf at most courses, this was a significant event.

The competition was not restricted to just black players, as Chairman Norris Horton explained, “We knew what it was like to be excluded and we didn’t want to do the same to anybody else, so blacks, whites, anybody who qualified and paid the entry fee could play.” Mapledale held the first three National Colored Golf Championships in 1926, 1927 and 1928. In 1929 the course closed, claimed by the Great Depression, and the “Negro National”, as it was called, began moving around the country.

What had begun as a dream for a place to play the game Hawkins loved, evolved into a showcase event that played on municipal courses in northern cities — Detroit, Chicago, Hartford, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia—attracting black golfers from all over the country.

Want to learn more? Watch Robert H. Hawkins and the creation of Mapledale Golf Course in Stow, Ma., produced by Stow TV and the Stow Historical Society.

Sources: A Course of Their Own: A History of African American Golfers (Kennedy, 2000); Stow Reconnaissance Report; Firsts, Lasts & Onlys of Golf: Paul Donnelley Presents the Most Amazing Golf Facts from the Last 600 Years (Donnelley, 2010).