George C. Thomas Jr. was not, by trade, a golf course architect. In 1904, he was a Philadelphia investment banker with a serious passion for rose breeding. He would eventually become a recognized authority on roses and write books about them. He had never designed a golf hole when a family friend, William Bullivant, asked him to lay out a nine-holer near his summer place on Buzzards Bay. Thomas later admitted he never quite understood why Bullivant trusted him with the job. Neither, probably, did anyone else. But he said yes. What he built on that Massachusetts farmland became the first course of a career that would eventually produce Riviera, Los Angeles Country Club and Bel-Air.
I have often wondered why he entrusted me… and admired his sportsmanship in doing so.
George C. Thomas Jr., on being hired to design Marion
But Marion Golf Club never got the memo that it was supposed to be a footnote. More than 120 years later, it’s still there, remarkably little changed by the century in between. Locals call it “Little Marion,” and the name fits. It sits in the shadow of Kittansett Club, the prestigious William Flynn design just up Point Road that tends to dominate the pedigree conversation. Marion gets less of that attention, though it has a feature almost no other course can claim: stone walls running directly through fairways and in front of greens, remnants of the farmland that existed long before Thomas ever saw the property.
The course almost didn’t make it to its second century. A few years ago, the longtime leaseholders who had cared for Marion on a shoestring retired, leaving the future of the town’s only public course genuinely uncertain. It was saved by Marion native Jeremiah Daly, along with summer residents Michael Kane and Will Fulton, who took over the lease and invested in irrigation and equipment rather than letting the place quietly disappear. They didn’t try to reinvent Marion. They dusted it off, restored what needed restoring and kept it recognizably itself.
Most golfers who make the trip to Buzzards Bay are headed to Kittansett. Marion isn’t the warm-up act, though. It’s something more interesting: a chance to see George Thomas before he was George Thomas—a great architect at the very beginning of figuring out what he could do.
