George Wright Golf Course

George Wright Golf Course is a public golf course in Boston, Massachusetts. The course was designed by the great Donald Ross as one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects in the 1930s. The course opened in 1938.

The course is named for George Wright, who was a Hall of Fame baseball player with the Cincinnati Reds, along with being one of the leaders of introducing golf to the Boston area around the turn of the century.

It represents one of the least known but impressive examples of Donald Ross's breathtaking design art.

In the late 1920s a group of citizens in Boston came into the control of the Henry Grew estate in the Hyde Park section of Boston. Their intent was to have the City of Boston build a golf course that would actually be a private club. Donald Ross was commissioned to design the course. When the market crashed in 1929 the project was abandoned.

The Grew estate was not particularly suitable for building a golf course. It was a mix of ledge and swamp. There was a good deal of speculation whether a course could be built there.

In 1932, Walter Irving Johnson, who had worked for years as an Associate of Donald Ross, took on the project as an engineer for the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission. George Wright became one of the great feats of engineering and building in the annals of golf. Before completion, 60,000 pounds of dynamite were used to excavate the ledge, of dirt were spread to raise the ground above the...
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