The library at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has just added a virtual road map through the history of golf course architecture to its collection — the collected papers and plans of legendary architect Robert Trent Jones.
Jones was a loyal Cornell alum who designed the school's own 18-hole golf course that bears his name, and he had long indicated that his collection would someday be donated to the school, despite numerous requests for those materials from other institutions of higher learning. His sons, Rees and Robert Jr., both architects in their own right, made their father's wishes a reality.
Jones is credited with the design of over 300 courses worldwide, including such notables as California's Spyglass HIll (pictured here) and Minnesota's Hazeltine National. His courses are found in 45 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and in more than 25 countries around the world.
Officials with Cornell are now just beginning the process of organizing, cataloging and preserving the more than 200 boxes of materials they received, as well as more than 400 blueprints for the golf courses he designed. The process is expected to take up to two years.
"Trying to re-create the original order of the materials is important to a collection like this one," said university archivist Elaine Engst in a news release from Cornell. "It would be impossible to work with such a large number of boxes, so you have to categorize. It's a big jigsaw puzzle."
Once a guide to the collection's content has been finalized, "you can flesh out a good chronology of his life," Engst said. "You can put together all of the material on a given golf course or see the development of golf courses in the context of 20th century American life; those are some of the ways you'd expect people to use this collection."
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