Devereux Emmet was born into a large family of ten children, nine of whom lived into adulthood. His father William Jenkins Emmet was a keen yachtsman and his mother Julia Colt Pierson was an illustrator and painter. His brothers all became prosperous businessmen and his three sisters were gifted artists.
Emmet graduated from Columbia University in Upper Manhattan in 1883 after studying law and six years later he married Ella Smith, the daughter of Judge J. Lawrence Smith. The couple raised two boys, Richard Smith Emmet (born 1889) and Devereux Emmet Jr. (born 1897).
Devereux was an accomplished golfer and reached the quarter finals of the 1904 Amateur Championship at Royal St George's, when Walter Travis became the first overseas winner of the event. He travelled regularly to the UK on hunting and golfing trips and was known to train hunting dogs at home for the purpose of selling them in Britain.
He’s said to have visited many of the famous courses in the British Isles on behalf of C.B. Macdonald, sketching holes that would be used in the design of the National Golf Links of America.
Alexander Turney Stewart, his wife’s wealthy uncle, purchased a large property on the Hempstead Plains of Long Island with the intention of developing the planned village of Garden City. Stewart then chose Emmet to design and build a golf course called Island Golf Links, based on links layouts he’d recently seen in Scotland.
An initial 9-hole course opened for play in 1897 and this was extended to eighteen holes two years later, with the final layout eventually becoming known as Garden City Golf Club. In 1902, Willie Auchterlonie won the eight edition of the US Open on this course, beating fellow Scotsman Stewart Gardner and Walter Travis by six strokes.
Credit should be given to Emmet for not going down the same path as his mentor C.B. Macdonald, designing courses with the same old – and some might term tedious – smattering of template holes.
In a Golf Illustated article, he once wrote that he’d made a conscious decision not to lay out replica holes like the Redan and Eden “because they have been overdone in the United States. There are probably twenty Redan holes south of the Canadian border.”
Now that comment was published in 1921 – how many more imitations have been built in the one hundred years since then?
In 1924, Emmet hired English-born Alfred H. Tull as a design associate and five years later made him a partner in the firm Emmet, Emmet and Tull. Devereux’s son was also involved in the company, though there’s no indication that he ever carried out any design or construction work for the firm.
Tull had previously been a construction superintendent for both Walter Travis and A. W. Tillinghast so he came highly recommended. Tull’s partnership with Emmet continued until Devereux’s death in 1934, when he formed his own successful design practice.
During a career that lasted more than thirty years, Emmet laid out more than a hundred golf courses. Despite the unfortunate loss of several well-regarded layouts – such as Meadow Brook Hunt Club and Pomonok – those still in play are intelligently designed and they remain the legacy of an underappreciated architect.
Extracts:
The Evolution of Golf Course Design by Keith Cutten: “Emmet was not afraid of subjecting golfers to ‘blind’ shots, par-6 holes, and other ‘quirky’ features that fell out of favour in the fullness of time.
His routings often utilised triangulation, with three-hole loops, allowing the golfer to experience the elements from all directions. Emmet understood angles and believed in width to allow for playability and choice.
Most students of golf course architecture award Emmet high marks for two aspects of his design work: extracting the maximum from the land he worked with; and variety in his bunkering.”
Devereux Emmet, The Naturalist by Mark Chalfant, published in 2017: “When it came to bold landforms, Emmet practiced the credo ‘integrate, don’t decimate’. So in Emmet’s fairways, sight lines are often diminished because natural contours rule the day. In addition, greens often flow from their natural grade so that front-to-back tilt fools the unwary.
Garden City is a prime example where ground movement was embraced by Emmet. Although he was the architect of courses in Cuba and Bermuda, Emmet’s geographic reach was mostly within a 150-mile radius of Wall Street. The architect’s surviving work is located primarily in three regions: Long Island, Westchester County and upstate New York.”
