Seth Raynor 1898 Was A Meticulous Engineer Who Left His Mark on Golf

“He scarcely knew a golf ball from a tennis ball when we first met,” Macdonald recalled in his book Scotland’s Gift: Golf, “and although he never became much of an expert in playing golf, yet the facility with which he absorbed the feeling which animates old and enthusiastic golfers to the manner born was truly amazing.”

Raynor impressed with his attention to detail and was hired on for the course construction, becoming Macdonald’s protégé at an ideal time. As automobiles made it easier for people in cities to reach nearby country clubs, a golf boom was starting to take hold. In a little over a decade and a half, Raynor was involved in building or renovating between 100 and 150 courses, by Macdonald’s count, spanning from his native Long Island to resorts in Hawaii and Bermuda. His work included a 1916 renovation of Shinnecock Hills, host of the U.S. Open earlier this year, as well as the creation of a highly regarded golf club for one of Princeton’s athletic rivals, Yale. (“As seems to be usually the case,” Roswell Easton 1898 quipped in PAW, “Yale has to turn to Princeton when she wants anything done well.”)

Relatively little is known of Raynor’s personal story — though frequently mentioned by the press, he rarely gave interviews — but in a 2002 biography of Macdonald, The Evangelist of Golf, author George Bahto describes a classic preparation-meets-luck narrative. Raynor was meticulous and frugal as an engineer, trustworthy as a contractor, and his Princeton pedigree put him at ease with the financiers and industrialists commissioning new courses. 

Raynor also had a knack for working with the existing contours of the land and layering materials to keep rainwater from collecting on greens and fairways. “Even today,” Bahto wrote, “course superintendents marvel at the engineering and drainage of his courses, most of which still work beautifully.”

Perhaps it followed naturally that the precise engineer would also value precision in the way players approached his courses. A long par-4 that doglegs to the right might easily be reached in two shots by those who place their drive on the right side of the fairway. But those who err with a drive toward the left are forced to either carry their second shot over a sprawling waste area or lay up and reach the green in three. Raynor himself was not an accomplished player, and there’s some evidence that he avoided playing too much golf “for fear his course designs would tend to deteriorate to his level of play,” Bahto wrote.

Postwar prosperity in the Roaring ’20s gave golf another boost, and Raynor maintained an office on Madison Avenue in New York to manage his many projects. In 1925, he traveled from Georgia to California, on to Hawaii, and then back east to Florida, laying out new courses in each locale. The New York Evening Post dubbed him the “busiest golf architect” in January 1926. But the travels seem to have taken a toll on his health. Later that month, Raynor died of pneumonia at age 51.

A few years later, the Great Depression crippled many of the new courses, including one of Raynor and Macdonald’s legendary collaborations, Lido Golf Club, built on top of 2 million cubic yards of dredged sand on Long Island. It was later bulldozed to make way for U.S. Navy barracks during World War II. But in 2023, the Sand Valley resort in Nekoosa, Wisconsin, opened a replica of the Lido course, built with the help of computer models and GPS-guided bulldozers. In an interview with Golf Digest, Tom Doak, the architect who led the project, called the layout “a much more intricate design than I had appreciated.”

Later this month, the U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship will be contested at Sand Valley Lido, the first of four national tournaments to be hosted by the course through 2034, proving once again that Raynor’s contributions to golf endure.