Better Late Than Never: Little Known Golf Architect Joseph Bartholomew's New York Times Obituary

Joseph Bartholomew (second from left)

While the The New York Times has always been the paper of record for obituaries since 1851, they too had an unfortunately tendency to ignore important lives based on skin color. As part of their Overlooked project, they’ve posted this wonderful remembrance of we’re adding the stories of remarkable people such as Joseph Bartholomew.

He is believed to have learned from Seth Raynor after coming into the game first as a caddie, and also later as a professional and course designer. He created several important courses in Louisiana and yet, was never permitted to play the courses he designed.

From Roy S. Johnson’s N.Y. Times obituary:

Bartholomew was in his 30s, in the early 1920s, when local golfers, impressed with his interest in the game and his work as a groundskeeper, collaborated to send him to a golf architecture school in New York, where he studied with the golf course architect Seth Raynor.

“Whooo, but I was surprised,” Bartholomew told Fortune magazine in 1949. “They gave me a whole bunch of money and told me to go and find the best course in the world and bring it back.”

He did even better, returning with the design for a course composed of holes modeled on famous ones at courses throughout the United States and Scotland.

The golfers liked it, and hired him to build it. Opening in the ’20s, it was called Metairie Counrty Club, and he was named its first club professional. But while he was permitted to give lessons, he was not allowed to play a round of golf there. Indeed, he was hired to design and build several more golf courses in the area for white golfers but barred from playing them.