The challenge, the camaraderie, the welcoming atmosphere. The fact that Thunder Bay’s Strathcona Golf Course marked such a major milestone this week likely isn’t coming as a major surprise to anyone who’s swung a club there.
The city-owned Strathcona, which is located on Hodder Avenue, is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2025. The course officially opened to the public on Sept. 7, 1925, and the City of Thunder Bay held an event marking the course’s 100th year earlier this week.
“I think it’s the welcoming environment,” Pat Berezowski, Thunder Bay’s director of golf services, said of Strathcona’s longevity.
“They’re proud of their course. They welcome the juniors, the seniors, all different ages.”
The city says the City of Port Arthur purchased the 1,400-acre Strathcona Property from Drummond Campbell in 1906 for $3,500. A further 125 acres were added in 1924, and the course welcomed its first golfers the next year (incidentally, Strathcona was a nine-hole course in those early years, with the other nine holes completed in 1930).
Thunder Bay City Councillor and Acting Mayor Greg Johnsen putts with a 100-year-old putter during the Strathcona Golf Course 100th anniversary celebration on Wednesday. (Kris Ketonen/CBC)
And all these years later, the course remains popular, Berezowski said, with hundreds of golfers teeing off on any given day during the season.
“I think it’s the challenge of the shots,” he said. “If you hit it bad, you’re going to be in the bush.”
“So it’s a little strategic, and you gotta plan your your way around the course. You don’t have to play it the same way every time. I think that’s the exciting part of it.”
Chic Hutcheon, who has been golfing at Strathcona for 66 years, said every day at the course is a challenge.
“My son being in North Carolina, I get to play a lot of good golf courses there,” he said. “I found this golf course a real challenge because of the trees.”
And Strathcona has plenty of interesting, lesser-known, aspects, as well.
For example, prior to it being a golf course, the property was used for training by the 52nd Battalion in the summer 1915, in preparation for their deployment overseas during the First World War.
That involved building a camp and rifle range, and digging a trench next to the number five tee.
But that’s not all.
“There was a championship ski jump on number five along the ridge, and downhill skiing,” Berezowski said. “I’ve ventured up the hill and there’s actually a foundation for a ski clubhouse there.”
“The trolley used to bring people up …Hodder Avenue. And it used to turn around at that spot where people would walk along the ridge,” he said. “They would they would enjoy some skiing.”
“And then in 1929 they built a ski jump there, an actual ski jump. Can you believe that? Trestle and everything, with lights, and that amazes me that we could share the property with another sport like that.”
Diane Imrie, executive director of the Northwestern Ontario Sports Hall of Fame, said golf brings a lot of good to the community.
A historical display set up at Strathcona Golf Course, marking the course’s 100th anniversary. (Kris Ketonen/CBC)
“it provides competition, it provides opportunity for just recreation and camaraderie,” she said. “I always believe you can tell a person’s character by just playing a round a golf with them.”
Imrie noted there are few public courses that last 100 years. “Obviously financial pressures happen within public funding, but (Thunder Bay City Manager John Collin) indicated actually, the course is make a bit of money, so that bodes well.”
She also said the course serves the community. “Huge youth involvement, huge senior involvement. It’s important for health, mental and physical, for people to participate in sport. And so that’s money well spent in my books, and in a lot of people’s books, for a course like this.”
Strathcona is one of two golf courses owned and operated by the City of Thunder Bay, the other being Chapples Golf Course.
