dsmWeekly - May 28, 2025

By Dave Elbert

As some of the world’s best golfers gather for the 13th annual Principal Charity Classic this week at the Wakonda Club, it's worth noting how far Des Moines golf has come since a handful of enthusiasts teed off in an overgrown pasture 128 years ago. That modest game inspired the creation of Central Iowa’s first golf course and eventually led to the development of three of the area’s most popular clubs.

The original Des Moines Golf & Country Club

The first recorded game of golf in Des Moines in the fall of 1897, well behind Burlington (1883) and Fairfield (1892), according to Rick Brown, who wrote “Golden Harvest: Iowa’s Rich Golf History” after many years covering sports for the Des Moines Register.

That first game played out on 40 acres of pasture at the end of the Ingersoll Avenue streetcar line, at Polk Boulevard. A few weeks earlier, attorney Jefferson Polk had said golfers could use the land if they paid property taxes of $150.

On Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1897, his offer was accepted by a dozen local golfers. By that Saturday, Oct. 2, a rough 18-hole course was laid out and balls were flying at what eventually became the Des Moines Golf & Country Club.

The project’s driving forces included Arthur Whitworth, an Englishman whose father owned the Liverpool and Des Moines Packing Co., and N.T. “Nat” Guernsey, who had just returned from Yale, where he was a champion rower.

The original 40 acres was too small for its original 18 holes, so the following year, Warren Dickinson, a local civil engineer, designed a more-playable nine holes. The course went back to 18 holes in 1904 when a 20-year lease was signed for adjacent land. In 1906, members built a three-story clubhouse at 49th Street and Harwood Drive with a rooftop deck that overlooked play.

Local historian John Zeller has explained that golf caught on quickly because wealthy Des Moines residents vacationed in the East where English traditions were popular. When they returned home, Zeller said, they wanted their own yacht, golf and tennis facilities.

Waveland Golf Course

As the golf bug spread, two more courses were built in city-owned parks: an 18-hole course at Waveland Park in 1901, and a nine-hole course at Grandview Park in 1902. Dickinson, a champion golfer, designed both courses. He went on to create more than 100 courses across Iowa by the time he died, in 1941.

Waveland was “one of the finest public golf links in America and one of the best in the world,” according to a 1927 Des Moines Tribune article, which noted the sophistication of its “natural hazards.” Golf at Waveland was free to the public, which was unusual. At the time, the only other free public course in the country was Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, in New York City.

Des Moines Golf & Country Club and Waveland grew quickly alongside each other. In 1911 Iowa Amateur Golf Tournament spread across both courses, making it “the first state amateur championship to be contested over 36 holes,” Brown wrote in his book.

Wakonda Club and (the current) Des Moines Golf & Country Club

In the early 1920s, as the country club’s 20-year land lease was coming due, the club split. Half the members, including most of the better golfers, founded the Wakonda Country Club south of downtown.

Others moved the original club to a new location, west of the city limits to property currently owned by Dowling Catholic High School and GuideOne Insurance. The club remained there until the 1960s, when the planned route for Interstate 235 cut directly through the course, prompting the club to move five miles farther west to its current location with a 36-hole course on Jordan Creek Parkway in West Des Moines.

Dig into more local history in Elbert's Backstories at dsmmagazine.com.

A Cyclone-themed car races down East Court Avenue in 2022. (Photo: Red Bull Soapbox Race)

BEST BET

Speed, skits and soapbox mayhem

Ready for a rush of adrenaline? Or maybe just some wacky fun? Then grab a friend and head out to the Red Bull Soapbox Race. The races start at noon Saturday on the hill just south of State Capitol, returning for the first time since 2022.

This year's showdown involves 50 teams from across the country, including a few from Des Moines, who will race their homemade carts through a downhill course filled with obstacles as fast as possible, in front of tens of thousands of spectators. In addition to their race times, the teams will be judged on the creativity of their cart's design and their showmanship in a 30-second skit. So each team needs to be fast, funny and charismatic to win the championship.

This year's judges are off-road race champions Andrew Carlson and Pleasant Cook, as well as U.S. women's national ice hockey team member Laila Edwards and University of Iowa football player and wrestler Ben Kueter.

The Week Ahead

Roses and Rosé, 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Des Moines Botanical Garden. Learn all about roses — their history, their care and maintenance, and more. Sip a glass of rosé and learn which rose variety is best for your garden at home.

Dam to DSM Half Marathon, 7 a.m. Saturday, Saylorville to downtown. The 46-year-old race formerly known as Dam to Dam starts on the Saylorville Dam and finishes with a well-earned party at Cowles Commons.

AViD: Kevin Wilson, 7 p.m. Tuesday, Central Library. Named 2025’s Most Anticipated Book by Time, People, BookRiot and others, Wilson’s new novel “Run For the Hills” tells the story of a cross-country road trip that brings a family together. He'll take a turn in the Des Moines Public Library's annual series of Authors Visiting in Des Moines.

Belin Quartet, 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Salisbury House & Gardens. The local chamber quartet continues its summer series of free concerts every Tuesday through July 8.

Zenith Chamber Music Festival, 7 p.m. Tuesday through June 7, downtown venues. See professional musicians from around the world, as well as local artists during the free summer concert series.

By Lisa Rossi

Momentum is a nonprofit arts program of Community Support Advocates, a social services organization that supports people with mental health issues and disabilities.

The program started 20 years ago and has opened new opportunities for artists of all abilities.

“When people think of disabled artists, they think we are coloring with crayons or fingerpainting or doing coloring books,” said Kelsey Burr, Momentum’s program coordinator. “I don’t think people realize the value of disabled artists and disabled art until they come here and they see it and they are like, ‘Oh, OK, I understand it now.’ It’s just as valuable as any other art and it has a whole story behind it.”

Community Support Advocates CEO Christina Smith launched the program in 2004 when she was working with a couple of really good artists. One man, in particular, provided the spark of inspiration. He struggled with paranoia but loved to make art with chalk and other materials.

“My job was to check on him a couple of times a week to help him move forward,” Smith said. “I wondered if we had something for him to get excited about.”

With this in mind, Smith organized an exhibition to showcase work by artists with disabilities. A local artist juried the show, which featured eight artists and attracted about 75 visitors.

“I got the gentleman excited about creating,” she recalled. He hadn’t been leaving the house at that point, but he came to the show. “That would be the momentum for his mental health recovery. He saw himself as an artist and not someone who is sick. He went back to school, back to work, and within the next 10 years, his life drastically changed.”

In 2017, Momentum took up residence at Mainframe Studios, where it increased its visibility and popularity. The program quickly outgrew its original studio and graduated in 2020 into the larger space it’s in now, which includes both a studio and a gallery.

“The studio space is open to anybody who identifies with having a disability or a mental health condition,” Burr said. “I don’t require any type of paperwork or diagnosis. I don’t need a doctor’s note. It can be something as simple as anxiety or depression, and it’s really just about the healing and growth of art and the making of art and how it can connect people. It’s become a really awesome, supportive, inclusive community of artists who come in and learn how to cope with their own traumas and barriers.”