To acknowledge the 122nd U.S. Open Championship being held this month at The Country Club in nearby Brookline, Massachusetts, June’s Object-of-the-Month is a golf club dating to the 1920s. It is a “Kroydon R8 John Cowan Special” that once belonged to Joseph G. Thorp, Jr., an important figure in the early history of golf in the U.S., and husband to Anne Allegra Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s youngest daughter.
Thorp married Anne A. Longfellow in 1885. He was a Harvard educated lawyer who practiced in Boston and was an active member of several Cambridge social institutions. In 1887 he moved with his wife into a newly constructed house at 115 Brattle Street on a plot of land just two doors down from the poet’s own home. Thorp was an avid golfer, and only a year after taking up the sport he was the runner up at the 1896 National Amateur Championship. In 1909 he was a finalist at the Massachusetts Amateur. Thorp was also a one-time club champion of The Country Club in Brookline, and a founder of the Oakley Country Club in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Shortly after the end of World War I a tool manufacturer in New Jersey named Kraeuter & Company began making metal heads for golf clubs. Their product was so successful they started producing a series of golf clubs, marketing them under the “Kroydon” brand name, and the company became well known for their use of steel-shafted clubs in place of the more traditional hickory ones. The club shown here is branded as a “John Cowan Special”. This is probably the prominent U.S. golfer John Cowan who won the 1923 New England PGA Championship and was a club champion and golf pro of the Oakley Country Club. He and Joseph G. Thorp, Jr. almost assuredly knew each other. The club is also marked with the term “NIBLICK” on the sole (seen upside down, at the top of the image above), which is an old term derived from Scottish Gaelic for a golf club that was the equivalent of a modern 9-iron.
Joseph G. Thorp, Jr. continued golfing into his later years until poor health forced him to give it up. Thorp documented his golf activities through the pursuit of his other personal passion, photography. He even obtained smaller clubs for his children and photographed one of his daughters practicing her swing at a very young age.