Welcome to HistoryCake and welcome to the Altadena Golf Course! If you have not already, please download all of the content before heading out on the course and tour. Once you have downloaded, you can set your phone in your back pocket or golf bag and we take care of the rest. Pause at any time, otherwise, as you near different parts of the golf course, the past 100 years will come alive through early photographs and stories of the past and the footsteps of the professionals and amateurs who strode the same course you visit today.

If you desire to and have a moment, you can double tap on any image and then "pinch and zoom" to blow up detail in the high resolution photos included.

The course attracts the best players in the nation in its 20's heyday. It is nationally renowned and played by the likes of Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, Leo Diegel, Bobby Cruickshank and others. Some of the holes you play today will offer the same challenges as they did 105 years ago. The afternoon breeze and wonderfully draining subsurface have been around much longer than anything you see today...

From 1910 to present day, we will take you from a dry wash out of Rubio Canyon to the number one tee you play in your round today. The second 18 hole layout is performed in 1920 and the present 9 hole layout in the late 1940s, eliminating the northeast quadrant of the course as it had been sold to the developer of the community directly east to Allen Avenue.

From 1911 through 1919, the Watson designed Altadena Golf course had oil and sand greens for putting. It was rare indeed for southern California courses to have grass in fairways at this time as irrigation of golf courses is in its infancy. When the course is opened for member play, no American has won the U.S. Open, we are still over a year away from Francis Ouimet's victory and the tidal wave of popularity of golf in the wake he creates.

George O'Neill leads the second layout which is much like the first but updated with grass fairways and greens and a name change to Pasadena Golf Club. This is the layout the professionals and amateurs of the day played and we will take you back to how they were approached back in the day as opposed to now. From 1920 to the stock market crash and depression, the course is counted amongst the best in the nation, especially in the early 20's.

The Pasadena Golf Club was taken over by the bank in 1932 after the great depression impacted many of the club's members. In this third and last rendition as an 18 hole golf course, it is renamed the Altadena Golf Club, and open to the public until 1944 when Ruth Kerr of mason jar and glass manufacturing fortune purchases the property. Kerr plans to build a place of higher learning on the land. The Altadena community arises in force to vote down her plan to build a college on the site so she sells half of the property to a developer for her purchase price, then guts the clubhouse and sells all of the furnishing and finally donates the remaining land to the county. The determined Miss Kerr then heads up to Santa Barbara and establishes the Westmont College that exists there to this day.

L.A. County reworked the remaining nine-holes of the 1920 O'Neill designed course and the Altadena Golf Club opened for play in 1950, officially opening in 1951, and continues to be operated by L.A. County 110 years after it was a wash full of boulders and cactus and coyotes. And when you stand on the fifth tee of your round and look down that 450 yard fairway, tip your hat to the "Squire" and the "Hage" as your feet ground your drive facing essentially the same shot they began their rounds with... may you fare well!