If Shane Lowry or Rory McIlroy wins the US Masters this weekend, they will celebrate their green jacket in a house built by an Irishman, a pioneering horticulturalist of the 1850s.
Denis Redmond (1824 – 1906), who designed what is now the Augusta National Clubhouse, might be baffled by what it has become.
For it was conceived with ideas far removed from golf, or any leisure pursuit. On the contrary, it was a deliberately utilitarian structure, meant to be lived and worked in, not admired. And in its own way, it was revolutionary.
One of the first in the American South to use poured concrete, it was also the centrepiece of a fruit farm, a concept then little known in Georgia. On a more profound level, it may have represented a vision of the future in which the local economy was no longer dependent on slaves.
Confounding Father - Frank McNally on the centenary of a radical Irish-American priest.
The Irish (and Redmondite) origins of the Augusta National Clubhouse
Dooley Dooby Doo - Frank McNally with more on the origins of a famous “Joycean” ballad
Child of Prague Spring – Frank McNally on a sun-soaked country wedding
Details of Redmond’s early life are scarce. But we know he was born somewhere in Ireland in 1824 and that by the 1840s he was living in Utica, New York. He worked as a printer then and was also active in his local agriculture society, winning a prize for geese at a New York state fair of 1848.
According to Ancestry.com, he was the son of one John Edward Redmond (born 1785), a name soon to be famous.
A later John Edward Redmond (1856 – 1918) came close to winning Home Rule for Ireland and was the grand-nephew of yet another John Edward, Liberal MP for Wexford in the 1860s.
It is tempting to assume, therefore, that the man who built Augusta National was part of the same dynasty, especially since his mother too bore a classic Wexford surname, Doyle.
Either way, when he moved to the sunny southeast of the US, Denis Redmond also brought with him another thing for which Wexford is famous: fruit. Hence the name he gave to the 315-acre property at Augusta he bought in 1853: Fruitland.
This Redmond too was a reformer. But his radical idea was to make the growing of peaches, apples, and strawberries the basis for a new rural economy in Georgia. Orchards would replace the existing staple, cotton, and with it - perhaps – the need for slavery.
If that was part of Redmond’s thinking, he never made it explicit, although he had opportunities to do so. His introduction to Georgia was via a job as travelling correspondent for the Southern Cultivator, a journal dedicated to progressive agriculture.
Its readership spanned the then-widening divide on slavery, so the paper tended to skim over the subject, although it later took the pro-slavery side. Redmond himself does not seem to have entered the public debate.
The context of his pioneering work at Augusta, however, was a perception that the old cotton plantations were doomed, by changing economics and soil exhaustion at least. Some saw divine judgment as a factor too.
A 2012 article on Fruitland for the Journal of Southern History quotes an 1836 novel about plantations elsewhere:
“Lower Virginia had already began (sic) to feel the effects of that curse, which has since lighted so heavily upon her and which, in truth, she has so well deserved. Already her fields were beginning to be deserted; already impenetrable thickets had commenced to cover plantations.”
Of one ailing property, the book continued: “The great House had been a structure of large size, and considerable pretentions. But the windows had gone, the doors had fallen from their hinges, and the roof was partly fallen in ”
Redmond’s design was a departure from the ostentatious southern grandeur of old, prizing function over form. The crowning cupola, for example, was primarily a giant flue to dissipate hot air – although as the JSH article noted, it also served as a 360-degree observation post.
That was one of several ways in which Redmond may have hedged his bets on what was about to become the burning issue of US politics. He was not opposed to slavery on principle, we know, because in an 1860 census he is recorded as owning one.
But his model home did seem to represent a definite break with the past. In the words of the JSH article, Fruitland envisioned “a big house without slaves, without cotton, and perhaps without a plantation.”
The Southern Cultivator, meanwhile, was getting off the (white picket) fence on the subject. By the late 1850s, it supported reopening the transatlantic slave trade. In one editorial, it even argued that the word ‘slaves’ was misleading, and that “apprentices for life” would be better.
Progress has come dropping slow at Augusta National too. The former Fruitland became a golf club in the 1930s and has hosted the Masters since 1934. But this year marks only the 50th anniversary of the first a time a black player competed: Lee Elder in 1975. Not until 1990 were African Americans allowed membership.
Denis Redmond did not spend long on his pioneering property. The JSH article accuses him of “hypocrisy”, not on slavery, but in abandoning the principle of permanence he urged on others: “Like so many Americans, Redmond could not resist the benefits of relocation.”
He sold Fruitland in 1858 and moved to another local property, “Vineland”. Later he settled in Florida, where he died in 1906.
I’m indebted to reader Denis Bergin for much of the foregoing and for a picture of Redmond’s gravestone, which bears the epitaph: “He looked through Nature up to Nature’s God.”
