When Gil Hanse set out to renovate Aronimink Golf Club outside Philadelphia he made it his mission to restore it to its original, legendary designs from the 1920s. The decades had altered the course’s identity with everything from new trees to renovated bunkers. But Hanse was determined to understand what Aronimink really looked like a century ago.
As Hanse sifted through archives, he soon made a surprising discovery: rare aerial photographs of Aronimink’s early days that diverged from old drawings of the grounds. Famed architect Donald Ross had called this course his masterpiece—now Hanse could see exactly what he meant.
And the only thing more surprising than the existence of those photos was the handiwork of the man who took them: Colonel J. Victor Dallin.
Dallin was a World War I pilot who fell in love with photography and became a pioneer in the art of taking pictures from the skies. He made it his profession at a time when flying meant filtering automobile gasoline through a chamois skin and landing in cotton fields. He snapped over 10,000 photos, including cityscapes of Philadelphia and New York, along with President Calvin Coolidge’s 1928 visit to Havana.
Dallin also happened to be a golf fanatic. And today, his work still shapes some of America’s oldest and most iconic courses.
When Dallin was airborne, he couldn’t resist looking out for any signs of golf, the game he’d play into his 80s. He shot Pine Valley and Pinehurst. He also captured Merion Golf Club on the day Bobby Jones completed the grand slam there in 1930. And, as Hanse discovered, Dallin’s collection also includes dozens of pictures of Aronimink, which hosts the PGA Championship this week.
So when the world’s best golfers sweat over the large number of small bunkers that dot the course today, it’s all because Dallin’s photography proved that those were all part of the course’s original layout.
“This is the mother lode,” Hanse says. “Being a golf architecture geek, when you find information like that, it’s a treasure trove that you can’t help but get excited by.”
Dallin, who died in 1991, was born in Bristol, England, before the turn of the 20th century and moved to Canada as a kid. He joined the service as an 18-year-old and was drawn to the Royal Flying Corps because the novelty of aviation appealed to him. That fascination led him to become fascinated with another piece of cutting-edge technology.
While most of the other pilots were interested in aerobatics, Dallin volunteered to take on a reconnaissance mission with a camera mounted behind the cockpit. Dallin simply had to press a button when he reached the right location. He soon learned that the first lesson of piloting—flying straight—was even more daunting when the smallest tilt could change the scale of the photos.
After the war, Dallin joined a flying team in Ontario before moving to Philadelphia, and aviation was still so new that a certificate he received from the National Aeronautic Association was signed by none other than Orville Wright. Philadelphia then became the home for his own business, the Dallin Aerial Survey Company, which he founded in 1924.
For his work, Dallin built his own customized camera that weighed about 20 pounds, and he garnered clients including newspapers, realtors and advertising agencies. At times, he both flew the plane and took the pictures, only needing a helper to swap out the glass plate negatives.
“I had to steer the plane exactly as I wanted the picture taken,” Dallin said in a 1969 oral history about his work. “The danger was it being so low to the ground, in many cases, that you’d be so enwrapped in the composition of the photograph that you would stall the plane and get in an accident.”
Dallin shot historical events, such as the Hindenburg on the ground both before and after the 1937 disaster, and created the first aerial survey of Philadelphia. He also had a particular eye for sports. He shot Army-Navy football games, the 1930 World Series in Philadelphia—and plenty of golf courses.
“He’d be flying out to photograph one thing,” said Kevin Martin, curator of the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Del. “And he could take a detour and take a couple snapshots of the golf course.”
For golf nerds, the Hagley Museum is a portal into the game’s past because it’s where Dallin eventually donated his vast collection of negatives. For Hanse, that trove has been an invaluable resource when he has worked on courses such as Merion and Aronimink.
Later in life, Dallin would settle down in North Carolina near the golf hub of Pinehurst, N.C., where he spent more time playing the game with his wife instead of capturing the grounds from above. But his aviation legacy lives on, even beyond the course restorations that will help decide who becomes a major champion on Sunday evening.
Victor Dallin III, who goes by Vic, lives in Philadelphia, and followed his grandfather into aviation—although flying seemed to skip a generation in the family since Dallin himself warned his son against it.
“My grandfather was very wary of those new jets,” Vic says.
But that didn’t stop his grandson. Vic joined the Air Force, and Dallin suspended his doubts about newfangled airplane technology long enough to attend Vic’s graduation from the academy. Now Vic flies commercially, and he can’t help but think about his grandfather any time he lands in Philadelphia.
“It’s nostalgic to think I’m flying to that same field he flew to 100 years ago,” Vic says. “Only then it was a grass strip.”