Home on the Ranch

It’s built on a former farm and it’s history dates back to the Revolutionary Era. The result – The Ranch Golf Club – is one of the finest public courses in the region

By Jeff Blanchard

To the wishful notion that some of us get when we find ourselves on a ski slope – Gosh, wouldn’t this make a great golf course? – the dream comes true in the rolling hills of Southwick, Mass., about 100 miles southwest of Boston, smack dab in the notch on the Connecticut border.

This is where The Ranch Golf Club, built on a former family farm, opened in 2002 to much fanfare, with rave reviews and lofty rankings as a daily fee course. It’s easy to see why. This is the classic “public course with a private club feel.” Everything from the extravagant GPS systems from which you can order food and drink as you make the turn or end your round on the 18th tee, to the ball and club washers on each cart to the grass tee practice range make you feel like you’ve suddenly become a member at a exclusive private club for the day. Yet, with a canary yellow farmhouse as its centerpiece and a staff that is extraordinarily courteous at every turn, you still feel like you’re playing an everyman’s course.

The fun at The Ranch reaches its peak in the tracks of an old ski slope, incorporated into the new golf course most noticeably at Ski Hill, No. 16. On paper it’s a monster 618 yards from the back, the final of four par 5s that feature breathtaking views of the Berkshire Mountains. But in reality it’s more of a kitten with a playful bite, the kind of hole you dream about playing when you watch these guys on TV smack the ball 340 yards over all the trouble spots.

The drive is to a wide, right-sweeping cascade of bent grass, framed by a soft shoulder of rough that helps keep the truly errant from having to take a walk in the woods. Ski Hill resembles a giant slalom where the final gate is positioned between two unguarded ponds – a tongue-shaped green that was built to spit back any ball that doesn’t make it to the ridge in the middle. So inviting is the hole to play that the vistas can take a back seat, even though they offer an unspoiled view of this corner of the world for as far as the eye can see.

The Ranch also provides its players with a window on the past, a rich history that features the first family of American currency and a century of farming, thus the slogan, “104 Years in the making.”

That part of the story actually dates back to the American Revolution, when Paul Revere, the original Patriot and prototypical American industrialist, enlisted a paper-maker named Stephen Crane to provide him with the stock that Revere would engrave as legal tender for the Colonials.

Crane thus became the first in the family to make stock for government engravers, a tradition that continues to this day with Lansing Crane at the helm of the Dalton-based company. Since the 1800s, the Crane Paper Company has been a leading maker of stationery as well as the US Treasury’s sole source of paper for currency - a contract it has kept year after year by staying at least one step ahead of the counterfeiter.

Paper-making for a time was the region’s No. 1 beneficiary of the industrial strength that flowed from the Connecticut River, which powered the mills that powered the factories that turned out the sheets that put fortunes in the pockets of the pioneering few, especially the Cranes, who may as well have been printing money.

By 1900, the firm’s success enabled Robert Crane to branch out on his own with the development of a model farm on a 2,000-acre spread in Southwick, a place where the cows bedded down in heated stalls and 20 homes were constructed for laborers who shared in the proceeds of the cattle and crops. The club is built on 340 of those acres, including hill and dale, two acres of new sand and 12 acres of new ponds. At 7,147 yards from the tips (with a slope of 140) and 4,983 from the forward tees, the course was built to accommodate any level of play, and is already hosting state and regional tournaments.

In retrospect, it was the ultimate in political irony – the son of American currency-makers engaged in a communal farming enterprise. Crane also had visions of duplicating the experience in other parts of the country, in an early stab at franchising, but it wasn’t to be. Still, vestiges of life on the farm are found everywhere at the Ranch in 2006, starting with the twin buttercup-yellow barns out front on Sunnyside Road, and extending to the 76-year old Phil Hall, whose family acquired the farm in 1920 and whose devotion to the place remains in evidence as he motors around the property on the seat of a tractor.

Hall continued to operate the Ranch as a prize-winning cattle farm until the 1990s, when the economics of the time made real estate development look like a better bet. It was not a new idea.

Years earlier, the Halls had spoken to Sam Snead about the possibilities, and Geoffrey Cornish was invited to propose a layout in the mid-1950s, but neither effort panned out.

These days, Hall serves as a living reminder of the previous administration as well as the namesake of the pub where players eat lunch, in one of the cavernous, reconstituted barns used for the clubhouse, a comfortable setting with a casual atmosphere, a friendly staff and a view of the action outside.

As a witness to the changing face of Southwick, which has evolved into a bedroom community, for people from Springfield and Hartford and various parts between Boston and New York, Hall has seen the pace of development quicken in recent years.

It began in earnest in 1990, when investor/developer Roland Betts secured the permits for a residential community that would serve as a destination for serious golfers and as a second home for people looking to build a place in the country.

Building lots and custom homes in several designs are being offered and built, but from much of the course, especially the front nine, the housing is invisible.

Ranch investors now include one real estate developer who hit it big with a fleet of Jiffy Lubes and another with a gift for computer science. The general manager is Mike Robichaud, familiar to many as the longtime director of golf at the Captains Course in Brewster. The head pro is Hope Kelley, who won the 2001 Massachusetts Women’s Open, and the superintendent is Jonathan Burke, whose greenskeeping and course conditioning would make any private proud.

To design the course, Betts hired the California-based golf course architect Damian Pascuzzo after a chance meeting on an airplane, which may have seemed like a rash decision at the time, but doesn’t any longer.

The end result was a course that is manageable if you can keep your ball in the fairway, but a true test if you find yourself spraying your tee shots on a regular basis.

Of the half-dozen holes that stick out in the memory, No. 17 may be the hardest to forget, a par 3 with water in front and wilderness on all sides, the very picture of a golfer’s sanctuary.

It’s a different sort of model community than the one envisioned by Robert Crane a century ago, but a worthy refuge just the same, an ideal destination for anyone who might see a golf course where there isn’t one.