A July opening, as hoped for about a year ago, has proven a little optimistic for the redesigned golf course off Tupelo Street. Construction delays set the schedule back enough so that if the green is ready for cleats this season, it won’t be until the very end of it.

“You're probably talking Labor Day,” said Ed Tanner, Bristol’s Principal Planner, who has spearheaded this project since the outset and was onsite for last month’s planting push. “It'll be a very short season, but hopefully that gets people excited for next spring. We may have all these greens seeded by next week, but you can't play on them until they really root themselves, even though they might look like they're playable.”

The main delays were getting the power connected and the irrigation pump installed, which meant that without reliable irrigation, the contractor could not reseed all the greens and tees.

“It took a long time to get a lot of things here [over the winter] but now things are starting to firm up, it's not so wet anymore,” said Tanner. “This is perfect, so we’ve got some activity going on. And the contractor will be back next to troubleshoot the irrigation system.”

Managing water, for the watershed
Topographically, the golf course is a high point and the headwater of the Silver Creek watershed: to the north, water runs downhill to Oyster Point, ending up in the Warren River. To the south, it runs through much of Bristol until it reaches the harbor. A major 2007 study on the health of the water shows how massive the Silver Creek watershed really is. It covers a good part of the interior of Bristol, encompassing not only the Tupelo Street golf course, but also the Broad Common Road manufacturing corridor, Mt. Hope High School, St. Mary’s Cemetery, and hundreds of private homes. It all adds up to a lot of pressure on an ecosystem that performs its important function best when it is simply left alone.

Contaminants enter the watershed from a variety of potential sources, from geese, whose droppings contain compounds that upset the nitrogen balance of the ecosystem, to fertilizers and urban and industrial runoff. In the past, an application of fertilizer, or the droppings of a flock of geese, would percolate into the watershed up at the golf course. The contaminated water flows downstream to the high school, where Silver Creek picks up the chemicals from any fertilizer used on fields or nearby lawns, increasing the concentration of pollutants.

The water quality continues to decrease as the water branches, flowing through the cemetery, behind Benjamin Church Manor, and past Guiteras School. By the time creek flows into the brackish pond in front of Guiteras, the water is filthy. Here, it receives a final splash of goose before flowing into the harbor with the next falling tide.

The new golf course won’t solve all the challenges facing Silver Creek as it makes its way to Bristol Harbor, but at least it will help it get off to a clean start.

A water quality project you can play on
Wenley Ferguson, Save the Bay’s Director of Restoration, has been consulting with Bristol for more than 25 years, and about this particular project for over a decade. When town leaders decided they wanted to maintain a playable course while restoring the property to something nearer to its natural state, Ferguson, who thought the plan would be to completely return the property to natural wetland, admits she was depressed by the news. But with the help of Landscape Architect Tim Gerrish, a golf course restoration specialist, a plan was created that made all the stakeholders happy.

Because of the project’s primary goal as a wetland restoration project, federal and state grant money has flowed in, covering the lion’s share of the costs.

“We’re enhancing the golf course but at its heart this is a water quality project,” said Tanner. With a natural stream and water trickling pond to pond, surrounded by natural plantings, the course will be dry, and geese, who like open spaces far from high grasses where predators lurk, should stay away. Much of the southern extension of the course will be allowed to return to its natural state.

A final planting before letting it grow
In mid-May, dozens of volunteers, some of whom are Bristol residents and others who were enlisted through Ferguson’s network at Save the Bay, converged on the site. They planted a variety of natural grasses, shrubs and trees at predetermined locations; Ferguson noted some, like a stand of cattail on the edge of a small pond, had reestablished itself naturally with no regard to the architect’s plan — as though the site itself is more than happy to rise to the occasion of its new purpose.

“What's really cool is to see how that vegetation has come back,” Ferguson said. “I’m really encouraged by all the shrubs that have come in,” she said of the many, planted a year ago, that successfully overwintered. A little further back from the pond, trees like Tulip and Sweetgum and Maple are going in, with the goal of turning that part of the site into a wooded wetland.

“This is going be a pass through a woodland,” she said. “Just like what this used to be before it was agriculture and then it became a golf course.”

Operator will be getting the “keys” soon
The town has hired an operator, Golf Motivation, to run the day-to-day operations of the course.

“They've been here several times, they’re coming up with a whole marketing plan, and our our agreement with them starts June 1,” said Tanner. “So they'll take over while we will finish doing the infrastructure. We're building some foot bridges, finishing the greens and the tee boxes and all the irrigation work, but they're going to take over the day to day maintenance, and marketing the course.”

The operator will also be renaming the course, with the Town’s approval, though that name is yet to be determined.