Man at New Golf Course Construction Site, American South, 1950s

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Man at New Golf Course Construction Site, American South, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Man at New Golf Course Construction Site, American South, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-1F7142

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Somebody decided this was worth commemorating, and you can see why: behind him, a freshly seeded oval fairway sits inside a raw clay berm, a small decorative pond not yet filled, and rows of newly planted nursery shrubs spaced with the optimism of a landscape architect who has never watched a Southern summer kill things. The whole site has the look of a private or municipal golf course about three weeks from its ribbon-cutting, which in the 1950s was one of the decade's more reliable civic status rituals — a community that had a golf course was a community that had arrived.

He's standing on the outside edge of the construction zone, hands loose at his sides, in the unhurried posture of a man who either owns a piece of this or helped build it. The gold medallion at his collar is the only thing on him that isn't practical, which in 1950s American leisure culture was how you signaled that you belonged to the occasion rather than the labor.

The red clay embankment and the dense mixed hardwood treeline behind the site place this firmly in the American Southeast, the region that in the postwar decade was converting pine-and-clay farmland into country clubs with great speed and great confidence. He looks at the camera the way men look at cameras when they expect the picture to prove something later.

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