Exactly one century after visionary Ward Blakely began developing the Loch Alpine subdivision and golf course, a contentious lawsuit has ended, guaranteeing that the 125 acres of open space that once hosted golfers will not be subdivided into housing lots.
At the opening of the 2026 annual meeting of the Loch Alpine Improvement Association (LAIA) March 25, president Brian Daugherty announced to jubilant neighbors, “Our ten-year litigation is finally over! No residential construction is allowed on the golf course. The land will stay open for generations to come.”
Applause and cheers erupted in the packed Webster Township Hall.
The hard-fought legal victory was based on what LAIA maintained was an iron-clad property restriction dating to 1975 that prevented any residential development on the golf course.
A2C2 LLC owner Lewis Whaley, an oncologist and developer in West Virginia, spent the past decade trying to prove the restriction was not iron-clad.
Before draining the pool and closing the clubhouse doors for the last time in the fall of 2015, Whaley had signed a letter of intent to sell the property to a Farmington Hills Realtor, who immediately approached Toll Brothers with plans to build large homes there. LAIA’s objections and the litigation were based on a deed stipulation that required 75 percent of Loch Alpine homeowners to agree to any golf course conversion–and that didn’t happen.
Initially, a judge ruled in Whaley’s favor, but two subsequent appeals sided with the LAIA. In March, the Michigan State Supreme Court declined to hear Whaley’s appeal.
Fortunately for LAIA, Auto Owners Insurance covered most of the defense costs, Daugherty explained in his annual report.
The final legal resolution came exactly one century after a golf course began emerging from farmland in Webster and Scio townships.
Now & Then
An army of hip-high weeds marches across the greens of the former Ann Arbor Golf and Country Club, like the ghosts of long-gone golfers. The clubhouse windows are covered in plywood. The pool is a graffitied gaping concrete hole. The grass on the once meticulously groomed fairways has either been cut by adjacent homeowners or abandoned. Tennis courts are cracked, netless and useless.
The Loch Alpine Golf and Country Club began as the vision of Ward Blakely, an entrepreneur who, in the early days of the automobile, invented a metal clamp that quickly fastened automobiles to multilevel open flatcars for shipment. Delighted that his autos would no longer bounce in boxcars, Henry Ford ordered as many clamps as Blakeley’s manufacturing plants could produce, making the Dexter resident a very wealthy man. (His home was the impressive brick house at the foot of Huron Street.)
An avid golfer, Blakely admired the Barton Hills Country Club, but knew it was tied closely to Ann Arbor’s academic and hospital professionals. He envisioned a similar club feared to the rising young entrepreneurs within Detroit’s automotive industries. His dream included an eighteen-hole course with two man-made lakes surrounded by a residential community of 410 houses, with a nearby railroad station for commuters.
By 1925, Blakely had acquired 470 acres with frontage on the crude buggy trail meandering between Dexter and Delhi. The next spring, he launched major construction projects: two dams across Boyden Creek to form Bridgeway and Greenook lakes; the front nine holes of the golf course; roads; and a water and sewerage system. He hired Scio and Webster township farmers and their mules at $8 per day to clear the land, beginning with the hardwood forest covering the twenty-three acres destined to become lakes. The nearby (long-gone) Delhi sawmill converted the trees into lumber.
According to Loch Alpine historian Joe Clayton in his book Our History (published in 2003), as ninety mule teams labored to prepare the land, Blakely realized that golfers would require good auto access. Michigan’s nineteenth-century legislation allowed neighboring landowners to build and finance “covert” roads, so, with his own funds, Blakely built Huron River Drive to connect Dexter to Ann Arbor. It was the last privately financed covert road built in the state.
Blakely allocated 125 acres, including wetlands, for golf. “In the days of Bobby Jones’ golf and hickory-shafted clubs, this was long enough,” Clayton wrote. “Greens were elevated. Fairways narrow. The creek was always in play, and there was really no out-of-bounds since the ball was regularly played from what is now someone’s back yard.”
Loch Alpine’s Golf Club Opens
Construction of the front nine was completed in 1928, the back nine by 1931. Soon after the new golf course opened, the Ann Arbor News ran a story headlined “Loch Alpine Is One of Michigan’s Finest Golf Courses, Says Golfers.” The club’s revenue consisted of two-dollar greens fees as well as fees paid by local farmers who pastured their dairy cattle on the future residential lots.
Clayton interviewed Al Gregory, son of the original groundskeeper, when he was ninety years old. “On weekends, I was the ticket-taker and starter,” Gregory recalled. “Some Sundays we had 300 golfers.”
Then the Great Depression hit. Blakely’s funding dried up, golfers fell on hard times, and home construction cratered. But the family persevered. After Ward Blakely died in 1935, his son Malcolm built a clubhouse and managed the course until he was drafted for World War II. During the war, Al Gregory’s father James converted the golf course into pastures for local farmers’ cattle and sheep.
In 1954, the entire property was sold to Detroit businessmen for $130,000. The first homes appeared the following year, and by 1960, sixty homes overlooked the lakes. Until recently, the newest houses had been completed early in the 2000s, but two new houses on the fringe of the property are now under construction facing Joy Road. Daugherty estimates that six lots are still undeveloped. Remarkably, the finished residential plan closely resembles Blakely’s plan.
From 1961 onwards, a succession of country club owners came and went. In 2001, the club created a new “equity” membership to raise money for a new clubhouse and pool. Club members hoped the new facilities would attract as many as 400 new members, but shortly afterwards, 9/11 occurred. Few newcomers joined, and banks became more cautious. They withdrew the pool financing.
Club members Herb and Betty Earle (now deceased) immediately offered an interest-free $400,000 loan to pay for the pool, with Herb explaining, “Betty and I did it for the kids.” They had no children of their own.
In 2002, the new clubhouse and pool opened, but within a few years, membership declined as fees soared. In the recession of 2008, the club faced its worst crisis since the Depression.
In 2010, when the club could not meet its mortgage obligations, member Michael Weikle convinced Lewis Whaley to purchase the note. The West Virginia physician formed A2C2 LLC, and paid $625,000 for the $1.7 million note just days ahead of a consortium of AACC members, who were working on their own plan.
A decade ago, Whaley reported that he had poured “between $300,000 and $600,000 a year” into the club. He opened the course to the public with annual memberships and per-round rates, but ran into difficulties with early Loch Alpine residents, who had paid much more. Under the new owner, “the greens and facilities never looked better,” remembered former LAIA board member Marvin Boluyt. “But there was no marketing for the restaurant, pool, or golf course to bring people in.”
Early in 2012, at the LAIA’s annual meeting, members voted to approve a one-year assessment of $150 per household to support the AACC, which would have provided muc-needed $60,000, with the expectation that if the relationship went well, the assessment would continue. But the LAIA eventually pulled out of the arrangement. By then, Whaley had been funding the losses out of his pocket, so he contacted potential buyers.
This was five years before COVID-19 resuscitated local golf courses. When Whaley found no buyers, he closed the club and contacted a realtor.
“If a developer had been allowed to put high-density housing on the open land, it would have been catastrophic for our neighborhood,” Boluyt says. “The fact that we have such a restrictive clause proves the wisdom of the original founder.”
What Now?
Immediately following Daugherty’s announcement at the neighborhood meeting, residents eagerly began fielding suggestions about the future.
“The pool is well-built and relatively new. It’s always made money—and in the past nationally ranked swimmers were trained here. It could be renovated and become a money-maker,” one resident suggested.
“But that would require changing rooms and restrooms, which means either the clubhouse would need to be renovated immediately or a separate building would need to be built,” Daugherty pointed out.
He and the board had already asked builder Steve Brouwer to evaluate the clubhouse. “It’s a mess inside and very unsafe,” Daugherty reported. “Everything that could be broken was broken. But the guts—the wall framing, roof and floor tresses—are in good shape.” Brouwer told the board that the building was salvageable, estimating renovation costs would run between $100 and $150 per square foot for the 14,000-square-foot structure.
“We’ll get a lot of feedback—and we’ll want to hear it—on what to do with the acres, clubhouse, pool, and tennis courts, but right now everything is very preliminary,” Daugherty warned. “We need to hear what Lew Whaley has to say.”
In subsequent weeks following the board meeting, Lewis Whaley declined to answer repeated phone calls and texts.
But a century after Ward Blakely began turning his dream into a reality, the Loch Alpine development looks remarkably like its creator’s original vision—and Loch Alpine will continue to enjoy 125 acres of open space, whether as a new golf course or a park.
Featured photo: The former Ann Arbor Golf and Country Club clubhouse sits boarded up and tagged with graffiti, as seen from the entrance off Huron River Drive. The property has been vacant for years, with visible signs of vandalism. Photo by Cynthia Furlong Reynolds
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