CHAPTER ONE: THE BEGINNING
“New Man Here to Build Up Suburb” read a headline in the April 10, 1903, edition of the Moline Review Dispatch.
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While history may quibble over the designation of “suburb” assigned to the newly incorporated City of East Moline, there can be no doubt George W. Ross held up his end of that headline.
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Ross left a prosperous Chicago law practice in the spring of 1903 to become manager of the East Moline Land Company. Then, he quickly went about his work of populating the fledgling city, parcel by parcel, lot by lot.
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The savvy Chicagoan saw industrial potential in the East Moline Junction. That was the spot where rail lines headed to and from Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis-St. Paul merged en route to the first rail bridge across the Mighty Mississippi just a few miles downriver at Arsenal Island.
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The new city’s commercial potential was enhanced by the construction of a Rock Island Lines terminus near the junction. This helped Ross convince Deere & Company to expand its growing operation beyond neighboring Moline.
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Two new Deere factories were built over what had been frog-filled bogs near the terminus, followed by a Vandervoort Engineering facility, the Deere-Clark Automobile Company, and finally a sprawling factory and warehouse complex for Deere competitor International Harvester.
Factories brought jobs. Jobs brought workers. Workers needed housing. And George Ross and the East Moline Land Company were more than ready to accommodate.
The company offered home lots for a dollar down and a dollar per week in the summer of 1905, and sold 172 parcels in less than a month. A year later, Ross and his partners sold out a new, 43-lot offering in two days.
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In 1916, a sprawling new high school opened on prime hilltop real estate Ross sold to the school district for a princely sum of $24,125.
In 1919, Ross and friends offered for sale more than 60 lots in a tract it fatefully named the Short Hills addition. Those sold within two days, and two weeks later another 39 lots to the south sold just as fast.
Directly east of those 100 soon-to-be homes lay 105 acres of hills, hollows, and fallow farmland owned by the widows of early settlers L.F. Haemer, Felix Gremonprez, and Orrin Skinner.
If not entirely rural, that land on the city’s eastern border was at least pastoral when Ross and the East Moline Land Company purchased options from the farmer’s estates for one particular purpose in 1922. While industry, railways and street-car trolleys had accelerated the growth of downtown East Moline through the first 15 years of its existence, most of the overlooking bluffs and the hilltop plateau had gone undeveloped.
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And so, in the summer of 1922, those 100 acres of rolling farmland dotted by tree-filled ravines lay ready to provide a beautiful canvas on which Short Hills Country Club would be drawn.
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Click on documents to enlarge.
Joined by a Border — and Golf
George Ross’ signature was the first of three affixed to the Certificate of Organization that announced the creation of Short Hills Country Club when it was filed with the State of Illinois on July 25, 1922.
The filing marked the formal conclusion to the combined exploratory efforts launched less than a year before by Chambers of Commerce from Moline, East Moline, Rock Island, and Scott County.
The document of incorporation also made clear the joint effort had morphed in the intervening months into an almost exclusive partnership between business leaders from Moline and East Moline.
Of the 12 founding members of the Short Hills Board of Directors, seven — James Johnston, G.A. Schallberg, C.F. Lundberg, G.L. Brumbaugh, G.Rodney Ainsworth, A.T. Foster, and J.L. Simmons — listed their residence as Moline.
Five — Ross, Fred H. Railsback, Louis Hamer, C.B. Rose and A.C. Howard — made their homes in East Moline.
Moline had been founded in 1848, the same year a Vermont-born blacksmith and inventor began to mass-produce his trademark steel plow just downriver from where the East Moline Junction would come to be.
John Deere’s company instantly made Moline an equal of the previously established communities of Rock Island and Davenport. By 1860, some 30 manufacturers had set up shop in what was known far and wide as the Tri-Cities, and a January 1882 “A Year’s Review” section of The Moline Review-Dispatch reported Moline was pushing a population of nearly 12,000, with no fewer than 18 large manufacturing plants within its borders.
Some years later, the new neighbor to the east could have staked claim to its own identity by adopting a name all its own. As noted by author Judy Belan in “East Moline: A Centennial History, 1903-2003,” East Moline Land Company president E.H. Guyer proposed changing the name to Paramount when the city was incorporated. But the community’s earliest residents debated the idea to a standstill.
Now, more than a century later, the derivative and less than original name still stands, and road signs welcome guests to East Moline with the less-than-boastful claim: “One of the Quad Cities.”
If East Moline has something akin to a collective inferiority complex, it does not come without cause. The headline trumpeting Ross’ arrival was neither the first nor last in which a Moline newspaper invoked the word “suburb,” thus inferring lesser status on the city to the east.
Inevitably, “little brother” fought back. Among Ross’ first acts of leadership on arrival in 1903 was to lead a successful resistance to Moline’s efforts to annex the newly incorporated village.
And, yet, the two cities were connected by more than a border and the same last name. Ross lived in Moline until he was gifted a palatial home on the East Moline bluff, and, in 1923, he was elected president of the Moline Chamber of Commerce.
So, from the outset, this was a relationship that was both close and contentious, brotherly in the best and worst ways. And while the sibling rivalry remains, the two cities have grown together more than they have grown apart, and the unified effort that brought Short Hills into being continues today as proof that Maroons and Panthers can work and, especially, play well together.
“We have golfers from Iowa and Rock Island,” noted former Club President Larry Meeske, a United Township High School graduate whose three sons all graduated from Moline High. “But in many ways, this was and is an East Moline and Moline club.”
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Hurry Up — and Wait
Ross was elected the first president of Short Hills Country Club on July 17, 1922. The next day’s Rock Island Argus reported 133 members had committed to a certificate investment of $300, with first-year dues set at $75. When the board convened again later that month, 166 members had signed on.
Memberships totaled 202 on Aug. 17, when the board announced options were being closed on the Haemer, Gremonprez, and Skinner farms.
By late September, Arsenal Country Club Manager of Greens A.G. Wagner had been hired to supervise development of a nine-hole layout. Tractors and harrows began clearing the land on Sept. 23, and the Argus predicted the nine-hole track “will probably be ready to play next spring.”
That was fake news.
The founders succeeded in shaping most of the nine-hole course by October of ‘22, but an exceedingly dry fall prevented seeding in advance of the winter freeze. In late October, the Daily Times of Davenport reported plans to construct a clubhouse in early spring but said the course would not concurrently be ready for play.
By April of the following year, the Board of Directors had yet to let bids on the clubhouse, seeding of the course was incomplete, and memberships had declined to 180.
As August 1923 arrived, all but the fifth hole of a nine-hole layout was ready for play. The Dispatch reported three men — Isley Johnson, Franklin Johnson and William Hull — “went around” on the afternoon of August 1. A formal opening of the 3,000-yard layout was set for August 15.
In late September, play was suspended to allow for additional seeding on the same day the board accepted a bid from the Odell Construction Company of East Moline to begin work within the week on the $35,000 clubhouse.
The First June Party
Fortune finally smiled on Short Hills Country Club on June 24, 1924, when a members-only gala welcomed more than 250 for a night of dinner, dancing, speeches, and merriment in their newly completed clubhouse.
It was a building the Dispatch described as “thoroughly attractive,” “most conveniently arranged” and “more substantial than most such structures.”
Dr. W.E. Taylor served as toastmaster, and speakers included Dr. Frank J. Day, L.A. Mahoney, the ubiquitous George W. Ross, and, finally, John Deere descendant and new Deere & Company chief executive Burton F. Peek.
Earlier in the day, Peek joined with Short Hills professional James Langlands in a four-ball match against Arsenal head professional Tom McQuarrie and that club’s champion Aldo Mitchell. It was played in front of a large gallery.
Mitchell kindly referred to the new layout as “snappy” and “sporty” and said it already compared favorably to the 27-year-old Arsenal course. The Dispatch would report that Peek, a future founding member of Augusta National Golf Club, “had no hesitancy in stating that no course in the Middlewest has greater possibilities.”
The evening didn’t conclude without challenge. A rainstorm made a muddy bog of the still unpaved road leading up and down the hill. “Two or three members abandoned their cars at midnight and returned home with friends. All other mired cars were pulled out for their owners by wrecking crews that labored from 9 at night till 1 this morning,” read the following afternoon’s Dispatch.
The June 20 edition of the Dispatch had previewed the soiree, and celebrated the club’s long-awaited official arrival under the headline “Short Hills Country Club Marks Another Step in Community Development.”
Membership rolls on the day of the grand opening numbered 200 families, a distinction Ross had long since made clear was and would remain a Short Hills priority.
“The family rather than the individual will be the unit of membership in the Short Hills Country Club,” he announced the previous December. “The purpose of this organization is to develop a family playground where members may gather without formal restraint.
“On this playground,” he continued, “it becomes possible to touch elbows in community thinking, community purposes, community activities and, above all, community personality.”
That’s a grandiose mission statement, but one Short Hills Country Club continues to meet today.
Equally appropriate 100 years beyond is the Dispatch’s description of both the course and the game Short Hills members have enjoyed for a century.
Reporter Mabel Schuur described the course as “a joy to devotees of the game and a scenic pleasure to all. A trip around will renew the body and mind of anyone, regardless of his game.”
Welcome to the club, indeed.