Annapolis Roads

Annapolis Roads is a private 9-hole course on the Chesapeake Bay waterfront in Annapolis, Maryland, designed by Charles H. Banks in 1928. The links-style layout features elevated greens, deep grass bunkers, and the Scottish-influenced design hallmarks that defined Banks's work, set within the historic Olmsted-planned Annapolis Roads community.

The Annapolis Roads Golf Club stands as among the architecturally significant lost courses in American golf history, designed in 1928 by Charles H. Banks during his brief but brilliant period as one of the premier architects working in the tradition of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor. The community of Annapolis Roads was conceived in 1925 by the Olmsted Brothers landscape firm—the famed partnership responsible for numerous American planned communities—as a planned residential development on the Chesapeake Bay waterfront south of Annapolis. The Olmsted plan called for a golf and yacht club as the social centerpiece of the community. By December 1927, the Munsey Trust Company, which financed the development, had engaged Banks to design the golf course. The Washington contractor F. Irwin Ray broke ground in February 1928, and nine holes opened for play by June 1929.

Banks was then at the height of his powers. He had apprenticed under Seth Raynor beginning in mid-1925, and when Raynor died unexpectedly of pneumonia in January 1926, Banks assumed leadership of the firm and supervised the completion of Raynor's in-progress projects—including Fishers Island Club and Waialae Country Club. Working independently thereafter, Banks completed roughly twenty original designs before his own death in March 1931 at the age of forty-nine. His surviving work—at Tamarack Country Club in Greenwich, Cavalier Golf and Yacht Club in Virginia Beach, Forsgate Country Club in New Jersey, and Camargo Golf Club in Cincinnati—demonstrates his mastery of strategy, topography, and the template-hole tradition. At Annapolis Roads, Banks worked within the National School of Design that Macdonald had established: incorporating interpretations of the finest holes from British linksland into American golf. Each of the nine built holes was modeled after a celebrated original. The second hole was a Leven, based on the 7th at Leven Links in Scotland, featuring a cavernous bunker design. The third was an Alps, possibly drawn from Prestwick's celebrated 17th.

The fourth was a Redan, modeled after the 15th at North Berwick, which Banks called perhaps the finest par-3 design in the world. The sixth was a Knoll, drawn from Scotscraig Golf Club's 4th hole. The seventh was a Road Hole, complete with a Road Bunker guarding the left and rear of the green and a deep pot bunker just right of center. The eighth was an Eden, modeled after the famous 11th at St. Andrews. The planned back nine, which was never built, would have included Double Plateau, Short, Bottle, and Biarritz template holes—an almost complete dictionary of the Macdonald-Raynor-Banks design vocabulary. Banks pressed for a full 18-hole championship layout, but economic realities of the site led to a compromise: nine holes were constructed on the primary tract, with plans for additional holes across Old Bay Ridge Road on a 46-acre parcel. The Depression prevented that expansion, and by 1952 the land intended for holes 13 through 15 was platted for residential use, permanently foreclosing the 18-hole vision.

The course was notable for the quality of its putting surfaces. Head greenskeeper Adolph Gerle cultivated pure bent grass of the Metropolitan strain that Department of Agriculture experts recognized as the finest in the Mid-Atlantic region. The club attracted prominent Washington society from its opening, including foreign ambassadors, Naval officers, and members of Congress. The inaugural invitational tournament on October 12 and 13, 1929 drew representatives from 24 invited clubs. The club remained private until 1951, when Ray and Roy Shields opened it to public play under new management. The nine-hole course is no longer in operation, lost to residential development—one of the many casualties of the Depression and mid-century suburbanization that claimed several of the most architecturally important short courses produced by the National School.