Macon’s Bowden Golf Course gets national notice

The Charles L. Bowden Golf Course is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On Feb. 23 the National Park Service approved the course’s application, submitted by Macon Golf for Kids and the Macon-Bibb County government. The listing was announced this week.

The application notes that the municipal golf course at 3111 Millerfield Road integrated before other public facilities in Macon, including the bus service.

Until June 1961, black golfers in Macon did not play at Bowden despite years of petitioning by dozens of black golfers for equal access.

Maconite Nathanial Veal, a Bowden caddy at the time, remembered when four black players took matters in their own hands. They announced to the City Council that they would simply walk in the front door of Bowden with their golf bags and play.

“And then they went out and played,” he said.

Veal said it took him one day to get out on the Bowden fairways himself.

“Well, maybe not the next day, but that weekend,” he said, chuckling. “I saw it on TV, and every black man in Macon bought clubs and started playing golf.”

A June nomination to the state historic listing was approved in August and sent on to the national register in January, said Lynn Speno, National Register specialist in the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Historic Preservation Division.

The 18-hole, 229-acre course was laid out in 1938 on the former Miller Field airport, and it opened in 1940. It was designed by John “Dick” Cotton, a Macon golfer and businessman, who with other local golfers had asked for a public course after Lakeside Course closed in the mid-1930s, the nomination narrative says.

Bowden was built with labor from the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. Speno said the course still has its classic design.

“It retained the integrity, and it had the story of the WPA and of the integration to back up the significance,” she said. Benches and a pump house are the only structures that still date from its WPA construction. The other buildings were built in 1974.

Speno worked for two years with the Bowden application, which was initially prepared by Macon businessman Sam Macfie, president of Macon Golf for Kids.

Bowden’s place in Macon civil rights history remains an undertold story, Macfie said.

“I think it just confirms what a small number of people appreciate, which is its significance from a civil rights history. That Macon should be proud of that. The National Historic Register will only enhance that,” he said.

Macfie founded Macon Golf for Kids at Bowden in 2006, a project that still runs today. This closer contact with the golfing clientele introduced him to the story of how, before 1961, blacks could only caddy at Bowden.

They’d create their own games and play off the course.

One of those caddies was Walter Worthen Sr., the only living member of the four black golfers who helped integrate Bowden in ‘61. In a 2014 interview that aired on C-SPAN, Worthen said his role as caddy made it easier to challenge the rule.

“I think that played a big part of it because golfers they respect one another,” he said.

Some golfers playing at Bowden on Wednesday were unaware of the course’s civil rights history. Others did know, such as Wallace Herring, who said golf is a social equalizer.

“It’s a gentleman’s game. It just brings the best out of people,” Herring said. “We don’t look at the color of an individual, we just look at their golf game.”

Macfie said that Bowden will wind up being only the second Georgia golf facility on the National Historic Register. The other is the clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Club.

“And what a contrast, but what a wonderful contrast that Augusta National, what many people consider one of the most beautiful places in the world, to be on the register,” Macfie said. “And then a municipal golf course in Macon with a history of civil rights also on the register. I think it’s a wonderful story.”

The next step for Bowden, he said, is trying to get the golf course included on the state’s Civil Rights Trail.

Macfie said he’s looking into getting Bowden on the National Park Service’s “We Shall Overcome” travel itinerary. There are 49 sites associated with the civil rights movement on the trail, including four in Georgia but none in Middle Georgia, he said.

“We would like to have Bowden included in that itinerary for people who might be following that trail, looking for sites associated with the civil rights movement,” Macfie said.

Bowden’s 75th anniversary is coming up in late September, and that will be celebrated, he said.

“We’ll have a community event -- to be determined, but befitting Bowden and its historical significance,” Macfie said.

Listing on the state and national registers doesn’t impose any restrictions on the property’s use, Speno said. A state fact sheet says listing can open opportunities for preservation grants and tax credits, but it doesn’t require specific preservation unless owners seek tax credits for the sites.

The sales tax initiative approved in 2011 included $600,000 for improvements to the course, mostly for a new irrigation system.

The course has long required annual subsidies from local government. The current budget allocates about $420,000 to subsidize Bowden. In 2014, Macon-Bibb Commissioner Al Tillman urged selling the course to eliminate the subsidy and use the sale proceeds for other needs, but no action has been taken on that idea.

Telegraph writer Jim Gaines contributed to this report.

This story was originally published March 12, 2015 at 5:53 PM with the headline "Macon’s Bowden Golf Course gets national notice ."