The site of the former Carver Golf Course, now a greenway, in late September 2022
photo by John Shearer
A few weeks ago, I wrote a story after learning that a golf course for black golfers in the days of segregation was located where the greenway around Carver Community Center is now.
Chattanoogan Kim Kinsey, who enjoys doing online historical and genealogical research, said she had never heard of the course, either, but found a few additional items about it after she saw the original story and started looking online.
While the course apparently hit its heyday around the 1950s and into the early 1960s before the walls of segregation came down, she found an item from 1940 that the club had apparently evolved from the Moonglow Sportsmen’s Club.
The Moonglow club had been chartered that year during a meeting at 210 East Ninth Street (now East M.L.
King Boulevard) for the purpose of promoting community sports events and recreation among Negro, or black, enthusiasts.
Among the 50 people involved in the formation were Professor Paul Franklin Mowbray (formerly of Fisk University and Tennessee State), Jasper Duncan, R.B. Buckner, W.D. Parks, President Eugene Smith, and Secretary Howard Jackson.
The organization later that year had a dance for the purpose of benefiting the club at the Milne Golf Course, as the Carver course was apparently then called.
Regarding the origin of the Milne name, Milne Street is just north of the old golf course and current Carver Community Center.
The Milne Chair Co. had relocated to Chattanooga in the early 20th century in that area, according to a 2010 chattanoogan.com story by Harmon Jolley, and maybe the old course was related to or near the expanded acreage the company had.
Among the other articles she found on the golf course, one talks of a tourney cancellation there in 1941 due to a polio outbreak that had also forced movie theaters and other places to close for a period as well.
By 1948, as Ms. Kinsey found in another article, a “newly formed Negro-minded golf group” apparently different from the Moonglow club had been formed to create the Carver Golf Club at the site bounded by North Orchard Knob, Citico and Cleveland avenues.
She also saw a 1951 story talking about a pro named Sam Sills breaking the nine-hole course’s record with a six-under-par 30. Mr. Sills, the previous course record holder, was playing with James McClellan, Wilford Taylor and Jim Cotton, it said.
And this club evidently had the typical activities taking place there like at other places. Ms. Kinsey said jokingly that she found an article from 1953 about a police raid on the course’s clubhouse that turned up “whiskey drinking and dancing.”
The course was evidently involved in a junior golf program as well, perhaps indicating that a good number of black Chattanoogans were exposed to the game shortly after World War II, despite the fact the private clubs in Chattanooga were for whites only.
A 1954 article found by her said that a Chattanooga Times-sponsored junior golf tournament was held there. Among those listed as winning their divisions or doing well were Charles Akins, Jimmy Lee Marshall, Alexander Kendricks, James Kendricks, Harrison Thurman and James McClellan. The Carver center director also in the picture was Pearl Vaughn.
The article calls it a municipal golf course, so the city was now operating it. Whether it was a private course in the days when the site was the Milne golf course or the Moonglow club was involved is not known.
Ms. Kinsey also found a story from 1959 about some neighbors wanting the Carver course relocated due to errant golf balls hitting or coming close to houses – an issue that has affected such other local courses as Brainerd and Valleybrook over the years.
The last entry she said she found was from 1961 regarding the results of a tournament.
The course is now long gone, but its history is coming back into focus thanks to the internet -- and diligent searching by Ms. Kinsey.
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To see the first story on the Carver Golf Course, read here.
https://www.chattanoogan.com/2022/9/26/456460/John-Shearer-Discovering.aspx
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Jcshearer2@comcast.net