Oakcreast Golf Course
Paperwork approved: 9/19/35
Cost: $9037
Holes: 9 (now 18 holes )
Acres: 40
Designer: unknown designer walked course with R.V. Harris
Opened: Summer 1936
Population of 1930: 1,028
In Roseau, you can’t see the golf course fore the trees (love the puns here?).
There are three different biomes in Minnesota: the Prairie Grasslands of the southwest and west, the Big Woods deciduous forest of the southeast, and northern boreal forest. Most of the WPA golf courses were constructed on land that was donated and needed to be cleared. It is almost overly simplistic to say, the amount of work it needed to clear the land depended on the biome or sub-biome where the course was located. This was the plus and minus of building these courses, you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to start the construction of a course, nor did one need too much in equipment or supplies; mostly, you needed some brute labor, and a lot of it - which put a lot of men to work when they needed work. (See picture of Perez and Anoka) It was a perfect fit, the men most qualified to manhandle the land/trees were oftentimes the men most likely to be unemployed, and thus qualifying for WPA work.
In the case of Roseau, although most of the northern boreal forest consists of spruce in Minnesota, there are some significant forests of hardwood including oak in this region (see also the Mahnomen course). In Roseau, the men who worked on the Roseau golf course if they were not lumbermen before, were no doubt lumbermen afterward, because they had to cut down a forest. At that time, there were several sawmills in the Roseau area.
At that time, typically, there would be a three man sawyer man crew manning a two-man bucksaw, and the third person with an ax to cut the limbs off the tree and notch the tree. Then, came the hauling of the trees away, think manual labor and but add horses again.
Your question is how much did they have to cut down in one year because they were playing on the course in the summer of 1936? In 2012, the Roseau golf course, expanded two holes and Carson Hedland, the groundskeeper said they had to cut down 25 oak trees. Currently, it appears there are more than 100 trees bordering the first hole, and even when one considers the fairways are rather narrow, it is not out of the realm of possibility to think the WPA workers had to cut down more than 3-500 (or more) oak trees to open up the course AND pull the stumps. Then, they had to build the greens; in Roseau, they used horses and a scraper to build the sand greens. All of this work was done without the power equipment we now routinely think one would use. Don Ross, a Roseau native, recalls the early days of the course still dealing with stumps and stump holes. (Picture of Don in 1945) It is no wonder they call this golf course, Oakcreast.