Ninety Years of a WPA Golf Course, and What It Means to Play It Now

In 1935, the Works Progress Administration built the front nine at Pierz. That's the same WPA that built roads, bridges, and public buildings across the country during the Depression, and here in Morrison County, one of the things they built was a golf course. Ninety years later, that front nine is still the heart of the course, dutifully maintained, and it's aged into something a modern course couldn't fake if it tried.

The land does what a designer usually does

There isn't a single sand trap on the front nine. Most golf courses use bunkers to create risk and force decisions off the tee. Pierz never needed to add them, because the natural undulation of the terrain does that job on its own. One golfer, playing here for the first time, said exactly that: no sand traps, but the undulation of the terrain gave him plenty of challenge, and he was already planning to come back. That's not a course that got lucky with its land. It's a course that was built to use the land it had, because in 1935 that's what building a golf course meant.

You feel it most on hole 4, a 166-yard par three with a slow-moving stream crossing in front of the green, and greens with undulations sharp enough to leave good putters shaking their heads. It's the hole people mention first when they talk about this course, and it's a 1935 hole, built before anyone here had heard the word 'signature hole.'

A hilly, honest walk

Gary G., who's played here for years without any connection to the club beyond being a regular, described it about as well as anyone has: walking the holes is just the right amount of exercise, on a somewhat hilly round, and your legs feel like they got a workout. That's the WPA terrain talking. It wasn't smoothed flat by modern earth-moving equipment. The hills, the pines, the creek Mark S. mentioned in his own review, the ponds, all of it is the land the course was built on rather than land shaped to fit a plan.

What ninety years buys you

David E. called it a hidden gem in central Minnesota, and mentioned something small but real, that he was impressed by how few bugs there were on the course despite it running right along the river. Little details like that come from ninety years of a course settling into its site, drainage that works the way it's supposed to, grass and trees that have had decades to mature. A brand-new course can be well designed. It can't be old. Pierz is both a working golf course and something close to a piece of local history, and playing it means playing terrain that a federal work crew shaped by hand nine decades ago, still asking the same questions of every golfer who plays it today.