The Tamaron Country Club golf course on Alexis Road, which was designed and built in the 1920s during a golden era of golf course construction in the Toledo area, may not open this year for the first time in its 92-year history.
If a deal somehow can be worked out for it to open, the golf course at 2162 West Alexis would do so with just nine of its 18 holes available to play.
“It would take a miracle. We’re cutting the greens now, and from what I’m told the fairways would come back, so we’re talking to three (course) operators,” said Doug Dymarkowski, a member of Drewso Ltd., a five-man private investment group that took control of Tamaron in March from its previous owner, Anthony Fuhrman.
“If we can work a contract out, we will have it up and running, but I would say the odds are against it,” Mr. Dymarkowski said.
Mr. Fuhrman’s family businesses, Tamaron Properties LLC and Tamaron Golf LLC, have owned the country club and golf course since 1972, when Mr. Fuhrman’s father, the late Charles “Bud” Fuhrman, bought the property known then as Sunningdale Country Club and renamed it Tamaron.
It was designed and built in 1926 by Harold Weber, an accomplished amateur golfer from Toledo who competed in the 1904 Olympics and who later designed Highland Meadows Golf Course in Sylvania in 1925 and Chippewa Golf Course in Curtice in 1926.
At the time the course was built, the area already had seen the recent arrival of Inverness Country Club in 1919 in Toledo, Sylvania Country Club in Sylvania in 1919, and Heather Downs Country Club in Toledo in 1925.
The 116-acre Tamaron, which is unusual in that its first nine holes are in Ohio and the back nine in Michigan, has been in financial difficulty since 2009 when it faced foreclosure and sale at auction over nonpayment of $1.1 million in loans held by Huntington Bank.
In 2015, Drewso Ltd. bought the $1.4 million promissory note from Huntington to provide time for the loan to be repaid. But Tamaron Properties, which also owed $144,000 in back taxes, eventually defaulted.
Mr. Dymarkowski said that through a leasing arrangement, Mr. Fuhrman and his wife, Vicky, will continue to operate the country club and its banquet business for the next 10 years or more.
Drewso also is negotiating to sell 48 of the 63 Tamaron acres located in Michigan to residential developer Decker Building Co. of Lambertville. The deal has not closed.
If Decker acquires the land, it plans to develop a subdivision of 60 to 80 lots for single-family homes. The remaining 15 acres would go to a private developer.
Mr. Dymarkowski said Drewso eventually wants to reconfigure the remaining 52 acres in Ohio into a golf community featuring a nine-hole course and surrounding housing.
“The clubhouse already has a bar with a liquor license. We feel that would be a nice community gathering point to start with,” Mr. Dymarkowski said.
Getting the course ready for this year would be nice, but it is secondary to planning the golf community. Drewso already has hired a real estate agent, Keith Brown, to market the property.
“In reality we want to work toward getting the nine-hole course laid out so that buildings could be laid out around it. Our ultimate goal is to sell lots on a community golf course,” he said.
But, Mr. Dymarkowski added, “I have no idea what the market for that would be in Toledo.”
Contact Jon Chavez at jchavez@theblade.com or 419-724-6128.
First Published April 23, 2018, 11:16 p.m.
