Magic Happened: Chapter 12

13,000 Years of Magic

For the edification of any future Ed McMahons, this unique, bi-state community has answered to Tri Cities and Quint Cities at different points in its history, but today is known far and wide as the Quad Cities.

Just because.

Should any future Johnny Carsons require a fuller explanation for the fuzzy math, it is this: East Moline and Bettendorf both were incorporated in 1903, but by 1930, when the term Quad Cities began to supplant Tri Cities as the area’s communal designation, the fourth member city most definitively was East Moline. Yet, as Bettendorf grew, many conferred that fourth-city status to that community on the Mississippi’s western shore. Efforts in the 1960s to promote a Quint Cities moniker fell flat, and, today, signs at the East Moline border stake the assertive if not particularly boastful claim: “One of the Quad Cities.” Meanwhile, most promotional references since the 1970s have listed the Quad Cities as Davenport, Rock Island, Moline, Bettendorf and East Moline — which is ground-breaking, actually, when you count the 14 members of today’s Big Ten Conference.

So, there’s that.

Officially, the Quad Cities Metropolitan Statistical Area consists of more than 50 cities and towns across four counties — Scott in Iowa, and Rock Island, Mercer, and Henry in Illinois. (The latter county’s pork producers, by the way, are owed many thanks for the aromatic memory that was Oakwood’s Pork Chop Hill.)

John Deere Classic Country, of course, stretches far beyond any official geographic constraints. It reaches west and southwest, to Iowa City and Zach Johnson’s hometown of Cedar Rapids, to Des Moines, Waterloo, Burlington, Ames and any and all parts of eastern and central Iowa. To the south, it encompasses Peoria and surrounding central Illinois communities such as Pekin, home of D.A. Points, and Oquawka, which gave us Todd Hamilton, the 2004 British Open winner who first announced his talents at age 15 by shooting 65 in the 1981 QCO pro-am. D.A. Weibring’s native Quincy is in JDC Country, as are the three-time QC champion’s college haunts of Bloomington and Normal. And let’s not forget Champaign, which is home to Mike Small’s collegiate powerhouse Golfing Illini, a primary producer of worthy JDC sponsor’s exempt players.

To the north, there is Milwaukee, Madison and much of Steve Stricker’s beloved Wisconsin. And, yes, of course, looking eastward, there’s Rockford and the teeming megalopolis of Chicagoland, where a few big-city sorts might sniff dismissively at our quaint small-town affair but whose true golf lovers enthusiastically head west every summer to catch the JDC and, perhaps more than once, to play Deere Run. Chicago’s primary newspapers faithfully covered the Classic from its earliest beginnings. In fact, Len Ziehm — the Hall-of-Fame golf scribe from the Sun-Times and The Daily Herald — long ago designated the Quad Cities “the Golf Capital of Illinois,” and he was kidding only a little in saying so.

Today, that regal title rings truer than ever. Since the FedExCup Playoffs began in 2007, the BMW Championship — formerly known as the Western Open — has traveled to places like St. Louis, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Denver, returning to Chicago only on a semi-annual basis, making the JDC the lone annual PGA TOUR affair in Illinois.

Most importantly, the QC tournament’s true impact has been felt all across Illinois and Iowa through Birdies for Charity, with dozens of participating 501(c)3 organizations from outside the Quad Cities benefiting every time a JDC pro goes low.

Yet, before there was a Chicago, a Peoria, a Des Moines, a Davenport, a Rock Island, or a Moline to be east of, there was the legendary village of Saukenuk.

From the 1730s until 1832 — just a few years before John Deere bid farewell to Vermont — members of the Sauk-Fox nation made a home near where the Rock River pays tribute to the Mighty Mississippi. At its peak, nearly 5,000 Native Americans lived in Saukenuk, which one historian described as “the queen city of the west and the most populous on this side of the Allegheny mountains.”

Sprawling Saukenuk’s most famous resident described the surrounding area as an idyllic land of plenty — springs on a bluff for fresh water, verdant bluegrass fields for horse pasture, Rock River rapids for abundant fishing, and fertile lands for growing crops such as corn, beans, pumpkin, and squash. “We always had plenty – our children never cried with hunger, and our people were never in want,” the great Sauk warrior Chief Black Hawk told a biographer near the end of his life. “Here, our village had stood for more than a hundred years.”

In the grand history of man, of course, a century is but a brief while. (Think about this: the John Deere Classic has lasted nearly half as long as that famed Sauk village.) Ferrel Anderson is an amateur archeologist and East Moline native whose interest in the history that can be found in the ground was sparked while hunting arrowheads as a boy near a place called Friendship Farm. He says the presence of Native Americans here dates back 13,000 years.

In fact, the tree-covered land Anderson scoured in his youth was a popular location for the area’s earliest human arrivals. The Hopewell Indians appeared on the North American continent as early as 100 BC, and typically settled near river bottoms where the mastodon and mammoths they eventually hunted into extinction were plentiful.

No fewer than six conical Hopewell burial mounds still exist on the 388 wooded acres that ultimately would become TPC Deere Run.

Those mounds were mapped through an archeological study co-commissioned in the late 1990s by Deere & Company and Anna (Hewitt) Wolfe, whose great aunt, Katherine Butterworth, daughter of Charles, first purchased most of the property in 1911. The golf course routing carefully and respectfully masks the sacred mounds within the tall timber and heavy brush where golfers rarely venture today. As a result, the golf course opened with the blessing of the Meskwaki council of elders who are charged with protecting the spirits of those earliest arrivals.

Chief Black Hawk almost certainly navigated the rolling terrain at Deere Run. Anderson believes that’s true because he heard from a Meskwaki elder whose knowledge he trusts that the great warrior’s father, Pyesa, is buried on the Deere Run property. If so, Black Hawk frequently would have visited his father’s grave.

Although some historical records suggest Pyesa was buried south of St. Louis, where he died in battle, the old medicine man would be far from alone if the Deere Run property truly is his final resting place. Anderson assisted with the archeological survey commissioned by Deere and Anna Wolfe. Through unearthed relics and grouped artifacts, the survey identified no fewer than 36 separate native home sites on the property, Anderson said.

“I imagine there are hundreds of Indians buried on that property because of the large number of campsites,” he said, noting tribes of Winnebago, Pottawatomie, Kickapoo, Illini, Peoria and Kaskaskia Indians likely would have followed the Hopewells and preceded the Sauk and Fox in making their homes on the bluff above the Green River Valley bottoms. “Generations of people are buried there somewhere.”

Farmer Erskine Wilson purchased the bottomland section of the property from the U.S. government in 1835, just a few years after the residents of Saukenuk had been resettled to the west. Wilson built the Stone House that houses the tournament offices today, as well as a nearby barn where the killers of Colonel George Davenport — one of the bi-state region’s first white settlers and namesake of the area’s largest city — were found hiding days after the July 4, 1845, murder.

The outlaws would have slept on the still-existing foundation that holds a newer outbuilding behind Deere Run’s second green. And Anderson may have laid eyes on the murder weapon while hunting arrowheads at Friendship Farm as a boy. “One of the caretakers there was a younger fellow who found a Bowie knife with a bone handle in the spring by the river,” he said. “Just a beautiful knife. I have no idea who that was or where that knife is today but I wonder if the guy who killed Colonel Davenport threw it away.”

The farm remained the Wilson family’s property past the turn of the century, with coal mining taking place along the bluffs in the first decade of the 20^th Century.

The parcel was one of four South Moline Township farm properties for which Katherine Butterworth recorded names in August of 1915, according to a report in the Rock Island Argus. While the other farmsteads — Midvale Dairy, Homewood and Orchard Hill — all would eventually yield to commercial or residential development, Friendship Farm, by and large, has withstood the test of time, looking much like the Hopewells first found it when the Rock River Trust considered its future following the death of Patricia Hewitt in 1992.

Patricia and husband Bill had purchased an additional 75 acres of tree-covered land following Katherine Butterworth’s death in 1953, and they transformed Friendship Farm into one of the Midwest’s premier Arabian horse-breeding operations. For Anna Wolfe, her twin sister Adrienne and their brother Alexander “Sandy” Hewitt, the property was a playground, and yet also a sacred and timeless place.

“I remember my twin and I walking up on the mounds early one morning when we were sorting everything out after our Mom had died and both realizing we are just so impermanent,” Wolfe said recently. “But the burial mounds were something so important to keep permanent out of respect to people who had been here before, just as we hope such respect and caring goes on for all of us for generations to come.”

The fortuitous timing that found the Hewitt family considering a new future for Friendship Farm just as Deere and the TOUR were discussing their partnership was a matter of magic happening to the max.

“It was destiny,” Bob Combs said. “That’s exactly what it was.”

As discussions toward a Deere-TOUR agreement progressed in the summer of 1996, the Silvis property was not on the table, however. Tour Design Group architect Chris Gray had mocked up a tentative design for the experimental farm property in Coal Valley, and, according to Combs, “Everything seemed to be headed that direction.”

But Friendship Farm was the agenda of a meeting in a quiet corner of the Oakwood dining room that September when the QCC caught a Tiger by the tail. A rained-out pro-am on Wednesday drew a larger turnout than the Sunday finale of the previous year. And while soggy fans, players and media huddled out of earshot in a clubhouse bar and hallway, defending champion D.A. Weibring and Sam Swanson — a Galesburg native, college chum and partner in Weibring’s expanding Dallas-based golf course design group — met with Combs to discuss a gem of a piece of property Swanson had encountered in Silvis.

Mere months before that meeting at Oakwood, Swanson had been shown Friendship Farm by members of nearby Short Hills, who were considering a new location over a Weibring group redesign/rebuild of their 70-year-old old course and clubhouse. The Hewitt children had rejected previous efforts to purchase and develop the land their mother so loved, and they likely would have rejected a Short Hills offer, had one been made. They were considering converting the property into an animal sanctuary when the family learned of Deere & Company’s intent to construct a golf course that would help preserve the golf tournament and its expanding charity driver.

“The family members were really motivated by the dollars the tournament raises for charity and the dollars the tournament brings into the community,” said Pam Anderson, attorney for the Hewitts and the Rock River Trust. “Without the success of Birdies for Charity, it would not have been as motivating to them.”

Even Bill Hewitt, a co-executor of his wife’s estate, had come around to viewing the tournament as an important community asset. When he placed a call to pitch the property to then Deere President and Chair Hans Becherer, the complex negotiations between Deere and the TOUR gained a new thrust.

“It was clear that everything about it appealed to them,” said Combs, who met with the family in October at Becherer’s request. “The fact that the land would be treated with respect for both its Native American heritage and it’s natural beauty; that it would be doing something of charitable significance for the Quad Cities; and that it would be doing something good for the Deere name and brand — the family saw it as a complete home run.”

It took just one look at the rolling acreage covered in old-growth oak for Duke Butler and Vernon Kelly, then president of the TOUR’s golf properties division, to agree. (It took a while longer to convince those visitors that the two large deer that leaped across their path in mid-tour were something other than a consummate act of stagecraft.)

“We just fell in love,” Kelly remembered a few days before TPC Deere Run opened for business in 2000. “I’ve been involved with every TPC as far as sites. This is certainly one of the best, if not the best, I have ever seen. From the time we saw that property, the project took on a new meaning.”

Wiebring was the early and obvious choice to serve as player design consultant for the project, Finchem said.

“Being an Illinois native and three-time winner of the tournament, he already had a great appreciation for the event and shared a vision for what the new facility would mean for its growth and success, particularly with the strong backing of John Deere,” the retired commissioner said recently. “We also knew that his experience as a player and designer would be extremely valuable in collaborating with our Design Services group.”

The historic agreement was announced on April 2, 1997, with a ceremonial groundbreaking at the Deere Run site. Deere would be an official equipment provider for the TPC’s then-20-course network, the TOUR would build and manage TPC Deere Run while leasing the land from Deere, and the John Deere Classic would debut in 1998, the first year of nine-year sponsorship agreement for The Little Tournament That Finally and Emphatically Did.

Weibring, his Golf Resources partner Maury Miller and TOUR designer Chris Gray already had begun drawing up a championship golf course on a vast and virtually untouched canvas.

The routing was complicated somewhat by a commitment to leave the Hopewell burial mounds undisturbed. But another tenet of the below-market sale price to Deere by the Rock River Trust was the prohibition of housing as part of the development. That meant most of the 388 acres on the property were in play, enhancing routing options.

“The normal golf course will give you 200 acres, and the housing development gets the best ground,” Gray said at the time. “Normally you talk about constraints and problems. With this site, you talk about opportunities and how to maximize those. There are probably 10 good golf courses on this site. We’re only doing one of them.”

Looking back almost 22 years, Weibring said any design starts with identifying the clubhouse, the first tee and the 18^th green. He said the architects first considered the site of what became No. 4 green, the highest elevation point on the property, as the site for the clubhouse.

“That’s a great vista. But how are you going to get in and out of there?” he said, noting access from Colona Road and a sensible spot for parking and a state-of-the-art practice complex dictated a decision to start and end in the middle of the property.

The uphill, dogleg starting hole just south of the clubhouse created a challenge because much of what is now fairway was a large ravine before construction began. Weibring and Gray debated leaving the gorge and forcing players to drive their ball over it, but the fact that the course would be open to the public — another Hewitt family bequest to their hometown — dictated much of the decision-making. A big forced-carry on an opening hole would be a bad way to start a round for most high handicappers.

Filling that ravine took the lion’s share of the meager 250,000 cubic yards of dirt the builders moved with John Deere equipment during the project. Gray said most TPC build-ins required moving four times as much earth, and he said the large amount of acreage available for Deere Run’s routing lessened the need to dig or fill.

Deere Run’s back nine ultimately was drawn up working backward from 18 green to create not just the amphitheater setting provided by the hillside below the clubhouse, but also to set up the finishing stretch that has created so much tournament drama over the years.

The easy-birdie 14^th hole was as essential as the challenging 18^th. “The first time I stood on the hillside at 14, I saw this downhill drivable par 4, green sitting tilted,” Weibring said. “I just saw that hole.”

The idea was to create a final run of holes that built suspense and led to exciting finishes.

“That was the deal,” Weibring said. “Coming in with the drivable par 4 and then having 15, 16 and 17 and 18 go back and forth, hearing the roars between the trees, a little Augusta-like. People sitting on the natural hillsides like the early TPCs.”

Jordan Spieth, Zach Johnson and Steve Stricker, for starters, would say mission accomplished.

“I talk to DA every year and I tell him ‘You know your vision was unbelievable because it’s inarguable that stretch produces great finishes,”’ Clair Peterson said. “It requires really good players to pull off really good shots under pressure. Some guys pull it off, some guys don’t, but there’s always movement on the leaderboard over those final five holes. That has almost always happened, starting with Michael Clark II and Kirk Triplett in a playoff the very first year.”

Indeed, on a magical piece of land, magic has been happening since Deere Run’s debut in 2000.

And, for that matter, for 13,000 years before that.

(This content, first published in 2021, is shared with the permission of the Quad City Golf Classic Charitable Foundation. Please consider a donation to Birdies for Charity.)