Fort Myers Country Club

If you’re at Fort Myers Country Club sometime, close your eyes and take a few seconds to imagine how Donald Ross designed and built the course 100 years ago.

Rich Lamb, Fort Myers Country Club’s director of golf for 38 years, added, “It’s hard to envision with mules and wagons and using your hands and sickles and shovels and wheelbarrows.” 18, 1916, ground breaking began on the course, then named the Fort Myers Golf and Yacht Club.

Donald Ross not only designed courses but he played the game well and he made clubs.

Marshall Terry and wife Tootie McGregor Terry had backed went out of business in 1914, members and winter visitors gave a “hearty and unanimous endorsement” of building another course in Fort Myers two years later.

Lamb added, “I tell people Donald Ross was to golf course design what Arnold Palmer was to growing the game of golf.” Day, a stockbroker in the Fort Myers Golf and Yacht Club, persuaded Ross, a longtime friend, to design the course.

According to the Fort Myers Press, Ross said the soil conditions enabled Fort Myers to build the links for less than one half the sum they would cost with poorer soil in other parts of the state.

Marshall Terry and wife Tootie McGregor Terry, a Fort Myers benefactress, complete plans to turn a cow pasture into the Fort Myers Yacht and Country Club.

April 6, 1916: At a Board of Trade meeting, members and winter visitors gave a “hearty and unanimous endorsement” of building a golf course in Fort Myers.