Camp Lake Golf Course History

September 5, 2026

The nine-hole course that Grand Rapids–Sparta Moose Lodge No. 50 operates at 11510 North Division Avenue, near Camp Lake in Algoma Township north of Grand Rapids,¹ is older and more complicated than the golf directories say. It is the surviving half of an eighteen-hole resort course that Charles E. “Charley” Broman had running by 1930. What follows is what the contemporary record supports, and where it stops.

Before golf: the Camp Lake resort

Camp Lake was a recreational destination before golf arrived—a resort, hotel, bathing beach, boating, dancing, and picnic grounds, with activity documented back to at least the 1910s. This rests on the Sparta Township Historical Commission’s holdings generally rather than on any item located and cited here.²

A splendid golf course, 1930

By the summer of 1930 Broman had assembled a small resort on the west shore of Camp Lake. The Sentinel-Leader described it that July: in addition to a splendid golf course there were picnic grounds, a pair of good boats for rent, a new dock, and a clubhouse then nearing completion, with kitchen service, shower baths, a broad porch, and a large sitting room with a fireplace.³ The golf course is mentioned in passing, as something already established—the paper’s interest was in the buildings and the lake frontage. This was not a field where a few holes had just been staked out; it was a going golf-and-recreation operation with real supporting infrastructure. Nothing in the archive fixes the date the course was first laid out; 1930 is the earliest documentation, not the beginning.

Broman took the greenkeeping seriously. In February 1931 he enrolled in the short course for greenkeepers at Michigan State College, and his name appears in the enrollment list printed that March in The National Greenkeeper, the organ of the National Association of Greenkeepers of America: “Broman, Chas. E., R. No. 3, Sparta.”⁴ Rural Route 3 was the Camp Lake address. That list is a class roster, not a membership roll—a distinction worth holding onto, since secondary accounts turn it into the latter. A country course owner traveling to East Lansing in midwinter to study turf is a small fact, but it says something about how the place was run.

Holding on through the Depression, 1937

The course did not sail through the 1930s. In March 1937 the Sentinel-Leader carried a front-page notice under the headline “Camp Lake Golf Course Has Membership Drive,” reporting a drive “with the purpose of making it possible to continue” the course for the coming season. Broman himself set it in motion. Memberships were twenty dollars for a family, with associate memberships available and green fees of twenty-five cents.⁵ The wording is worth noting: the drive was not an expansion but a rescue.

The club at its height, 1938–1939

It worked. The next two seasons are the best-documented in the paper’s run, and they show a going concern with a social life attached to it.

The club advertised in May 1938 under Broman’s own name—“Special Steak and Chicken Dinners by Appointment. Chas. Broman Proprietor”—and announced that Eddie Downer of Flint had been engaged as chef for the summer.⁶ By June the Sentinel-Leader could report that the golf club was in full swing, with the Sparta high school faculty dining at the club and members of the Carl A. Johnson Post playing a round followed by dinner.⁷ The weekly Camp Lake column that summer describes a division of labor that would have been obvious to anyone who went out there: Mrs. Broman kept busy at the golf club serving chicken dinners while her husband ran the tournament schedule.⁸ She was serving Sunday dinners into July.⁹ The June tournament went to Osborne of Cedar Springs, who beat Reister of Sparta in the final.¹⁰ Along the way the paper recorded a hole-in-one on a 175-yard shot by “Red” Hendrickson of Newaygo, a Kent County Bankers’ all-day picnic and golf outing, and a championship flight in September won by Keller over Skinner.

The following spring the paper described the course at its fullest extent. Charles and Mrs. Broman had returned to Camp Lake after wintering in Grand Rapids, and “the 18-hole golf course is now open to the public,” with the greens in excellent condition. Fifty members of the Carl A. Johnson Post of Grand Rapids were booked for a tournament that Saturday, with luncheon served at the clubhouse.¹¹ Eighteen holes is a substantial course for a rural operation, and this is the only explicit statement of the hole count in the years documented here.

The season closed in October with the annual fall tournament, played to a 36-hole final at Camp Lake Golf Club, in which Alvin Reister beat Clarence Anderson for a year’s possession of the Broman Golf Trophy. The cup required a triple entry for permanent holding, and the plate already carried Howard Keller for 1935 and 1936 and Clarence Anderson for 1937 and 1938—so the trophy, and the tournament behind it, went back at least to 1935. Jack Pollack of Cedar Springs took the first flight, Bert Skinner the consolation.¹² This was a golf club, in other words, and not merely a tourist amenity.

The war years and after

Documentation thins after 1939. The course was still a community fixture in the last summer of the war: in August 1945 the Sparta Chamber of Commerce scheduled an afternoon golf match for men and ladies at the Camp Lake golf course, followed by a pot luck supper at seven, with two Muskegon male quartets entertaining members and their wives afterward.¹³

Broman gave up the course around 1951, seven years before his death. He died on a Sunday in March 1958, aged 76, at a local convalescent home. Funeral services were held at the Hessel Funeral Home, with burial in Greenwood Cemetery under Masonic auspices; he belonged to Sparta Lodge No. 334, F&AM, and to Fountain Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, and was survived by his wife Helen and two sisters. The Sentinel-Leader’s account is spare about the course itself, noting only that he had “operated the Camp Lake golf course previous to his retirement seven years ago.”¹⁴ The Camp Lake column in the same issue was warmer, and confirms the partnership: “Charlie and his wife were former owners of the Golf Club.”

Harold Lister, and a course cut in half

Between Broman’s retirement and 1963 the course passed to Harold Lister. No item recording that purchase has been found; the only evidence of it is retrospective, in the notice of the next sale. What happened to the second nine in those years is likewise undocumented. All that can be said from the record is that eighteen holes were open to the public in May 1939 and nine holes were open in June 1963, and that the reduction happened somewhere in between, most plausibly during or after the war, when the course lost its documented public profile. Whether it occurred under Broman, in the transition around 1951, or under Lister is not established.

DeFouw and Way, 1963

On June 5, 1963, the Sentinel-Leader announced “Camp Lake Golf Course Now Open,” calling it “Sparta’s newest business enterprise”—a description that plainly meant the renovated and reopened operation, not a new course. The owners were Gordon DeFouw and Eddie Way, his son-in-law, who had moved from Grand Rapids to the clubhouse and grounds they had recently bought from Harold Lister and had set about rejuvenating. The paper gave the shape of the property plainly: “The course consists of nine holes lying west of Camp Lake and east of Division St.”¹⁵ That is the nine that survives, on the same ground rather than on a separate course built nearby.

Moose Lodge No. 50, 1974–1977

The Grand Rapids–Sparta Moose Lodge No. 50, which began in downtown Grand Rapids and has moved twice,¹⁶ bought the property in 1974—the golf course together with its chalet clubhouse at 11510 N. Division Avenue. The lodge did not build a golf course; it acquired one already more than four decades old.

The lodge’s own retrospective, published in the North Kent Leader in January 1978, tells what followed. Members were meeting in the basement when, in June 1975, “a fire demolished the building.” They rebuilt the basement themselves, hired a company to put up the shell of the upper story, and finished the interior with their own labor, moving upstairs in September 1977. The large dancing area was still unfinished when the article appeared, and secretary-treasurer Jim Bouman reported that membership and assets had grown substantially in the lodge’s three years there. The occasion for the piece was a tribute dinner set for January 28, at which the Fellowship Degree went to Bill Pyard, Fred Lesert, and Dick Campbell.¹⁷

The chalet Charley Broman’s successors had rejuvenated in 1963 was therefore gone within two years of the Moose taking it over, and the building that stands on the site is the members’ own work. The course they bought with it is the same nine holes the Sentinel-Leader described in 1963—west of Camp Lake, east of Division—which are in turn nine of the eighteen Broman had open in 1939.

The course today

Under Moose ownership the course settled into its present form: a small nine-hole course belonging to Lodge No. 50 and open primarily to members and their guests.¹⁸ The back course is generally listed at 2,764 yards and par 35, with three par threes, four par fours, and two par fives; the forward course runs about 2,385 yards, given par 37 in some databases.¹⁹

Back-tee yardages as published by the golf databases—useful, but not verified against the course:¹⁹

The terrain is rolling and tree-lined, with several ponds in play. One modern description carries what sounds like inherited history—that the property was built from pastureland and once owned by a golf professional¹⁸—which fits Broman loosely but is not documented well enough to say whom or when it means.

No current USGA Course Rating or Slope Rating is published for either set of tees; the databases that normally carry them show blanks or zero placeholders.²⁰ Nothing found so far shows that this course or its Camp Lake predecessor was ever officially rated, though an expired rating could simply have dropped out of the modern databases. Golf Association of Michigan records would settle it.

The lodge and the course remain tied to the Camp Lake community: local planning documents list the Moose facility as a private nine-hole golf course and lodge,²¹ and the Camp Lake Association has used the property for golf events and community gatherings.²²

The dates the directories give

Several golf directories give 1950 as the opening year.²³ That is incompatible with the newspaper record and should not be used: an established Broman operation existed by 1930, organized club play ran through the 1930s, eighteen holes were open in 1939, and golf continued in 1945. If the date means anything at all, it is probably an approximation of Broman’s retirement or a later administrative milestone.

One database gives 1922 instead.²⁰ That is chronologically plausible—it would sit comfortably before the mature operation of 1930—but no contemporary source has been found to support it.

Chronology

What remains unresolved

Four questions the record does not answer. First, and largest, the fate of the second nine: no item between 1939 and 1963 states a hole count or records an abandonment, and nothing says where those holes ran. Aerial photography, plats, and tax maps would be the way at it; recovering them would also recover the original architecture of the Camp Lake course and might push the lineage back past 1930. Second, the date Harold Lister bought the course, attested only by the 1963 sale notice. Third, the day of the June 1975 fire; the 1978 retrospective gives only the month, and contemporary coverage falls outside the digitized range of both the Sentinel-Leader, which ends in 1971, and the North Kent Leader, which begins in 1977. Fourth, whether the course was ever officially rated.

A note on the sources

Newspaper citations below are to the Sparta Township Historical Commission’s digitized runs. Each footnote gives the masthead date and printed page, the archive’s own filename, and a direct link to the single-page scan. Where a page carries no printed folio—the Sentinel-Leader’s front pages never do—that is stated rather than inferred from position. Quoted snippets are transcribed from the scans; OCR artifacts in the underlying text layer have been silently corrected only where the printed original is unambiguous. Footnotes marked TBD are leads, not verified citations; the modern-course footnotes are commercial directories and are no better than their unstated sources.