Connecticut Photo Album: Isabella Eldridge's Early Public Golf Course, Norfolk Downs [Golf Links], New York Architect Alfredo S.G. Taylor, Eldridge Gymnasium, Ellen Battell Stoeckel, Yale, and Early Women Golfers

Norwalk, 1909. Card . Very good. String tied photograph album with fourteen snapshots assembled neatly and captioned in white. The Norfolk Gymnasium and surrounds, Edwardian clad women seated, gathered and walking, holding golf clubs and cases captioned, "To the Golf Grounds", "Home from the LInks', "Watching the Golf Tournament", etc.

The original nine-hole course built in 1897, Norfolk Downs, was one of the first public courses in the country, built by Isabella Eldridge, whose visionary largesse also funded the creation of the Norfolk Gymnasium, Norfolk Library and Village Green. In 1906, Alfredo Taylor drew plans for the Norfolk Downs Shelter (truncated) at the links, which is now considered a predecessor to Taylor's design for Dr. Frederick Shepard Dennis's Tamarack Lodge Bungalow/Dennis Pavilion.

The private Norfolk country club was formalized in 1916, as a solution to locals dissatisfaction with Downs, primarily as Miss Eldridge did not allow for golf to be played on [Sabbath] Sundays. In the years following, Mr. A. W. Tillinghast, a celebrated course architect of the day, designed the course now seen at Norfolk.

After the Eldridge sisters died, their cousin Ellen Battell Stoeckel remodeled their home as a community center known as Battell House. Battell formed a trust was established that provided for music, art, and literary offerings to be carried on under the auspices of Yale University on the property. Following Ellens death in 1939, Alfredo Taylor transformed the bucolic Stoeckel estate into a campus for the Norfolk Music School of Yale University, which evolved into the Yale Summer School of Music and Art where the arts continue to flourish today. (Inventory #: 30607)