Du Pont Winterthur Golf Club

Last night, I dreamt I went to Winterthur again: A bird's-eye view of the Delaware estate back in the day.

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A Dubai sheik is about to break ground—if that's the right phrase—on a residential golf community hewn from the sands of the Arabian desert. Designed by Tiger Woods, Al Ruwaya (meaning "serenity") will be part of a huge theme-park complex known as Dubailand.

The ambitious $1.1 billion project promises five million square feet of locally grown grass and more than 30,000 full-grown imported trees. The sheik's holding company plans to flank the course with 197 so-called palaces (100,000 square feet), mansions (50,000 square feet), and villas (30,000 square feet). Ads promote Al Ruwaya as the most exclusive golf club ever.

Which turns out to be not even remotely true. Eighty years ago, Henry Francis du Pont—the antiques collector, horticulturist, and great-grandson of the chemical company's founder—had a private course laid out on the grounds of Winterthur, his rambling 2,500-acre country estate in northern Delaware.

No golf club has ever been more exclusive. Winterthur had only one member: H.F. du Pont.

At 96,582 square feet, du Pont's house could have held its own with any Arabian golf palace. The compound was so vast that du Pont had his own personal railway station, volunteer fire department, and dairy, where 300 Holsteins produced 3.3 million pounds of milk a year. Not that anyone ever poured du Pont a pound at the 19th hole.

Accustomed to filling his home with Philadelphia Chippendale chairs and Paul Revere silver, du Pont sought the imprint of one of golf's own masters on his landscape. He enlisted Devereaux Emmet, a manor-born man of leisure who passed his idle hours training hunting dogs in the summer, selling them in Ireland in the fall, and spending the winter golfing and hunting in the British Isles.

In the spring of 1899, Emmet carved a nine-holer out of an enormous loam deposit on Long Island. Eventually, he remodeled and expanded the course, which was renamed the Garden City Golf Club. The total cost was $2,000—a good $57,000 less than what he required three decades later to build the layout at Winterthur.

Before completion, du Pont hired his own pro, a Scot named Percy Vickers. They had met in 1923 at an indoor golf academy—on the second floor of a Manhattan brownstone—where Vickers was a teacher. Du Pont was driven to his classes at Elphick Golf School by his chauffeur, the improbably named Dick Upright.

Dick Upright! One imagines he and Vickers having a stiff one together, and the pro asking, "What's your handicap, Dick Upright?" And the chauffeur replying: "Sir, that is my handicap."

Vickers, who moonlighted as groundskeeper, worked du Pont's bag for nearly 40 years. The scion played five times a week into his 80s, always walking, and always shunning a golf cart. He'd whack away as a rooftop loudspeaker blasted arias from the Metropolitan Opera. In all sorts of weather— even in blazing summer heat—he traversed the fairways wearing two sweaters.   

The only real hazards on his course were the daffodils. Course Rule No. 7: If a ball landed in the bed off the fifth fairway, du Pont assessed himself a one-stroke penalty.

For du Pont, golf was a solitary pleasure. One summer morning, one of his young cousins called Vickers to say he would like to come out to play that afternoon. Quite impossible, the pro informed him; the course was full. That made no sense to the lad, so he persisted. "Who's playing? he asked. Vickers' reply was as succinct as it was pointed: "Why, Mr. du Pont, of course."

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