About PrairieView

The first notion of a premier public golf course butting up against the Byron Forest Preserve District's restored prairie land began quite innocently, spawned by a handful of area golf enthusiasts who recognized the region's appetite and marketplace desire for a championship-caliber golf experience.

Late in the 1980s, with crude course layout sketches penned on a napkin, the group presented their initial dreams for the 159 acres of fallow cropland to the Forest Preserve. Informal discussions were embraced and were soon followed by market and feasibility studies, funding explorations, site surveys, land-use and environmental planning, and, eventually, a formal course-development resolution. The course, later to be named "PrairieView", was, indeed, on its way to becoming a reality.

William James Spear & Associates, with their firm's solid reputation for designing courses of laudable merit throughout the Midwest (including the Amana Colonies Golf Course), was retained for carrying out the strategic design and course architecture duties. Ryan Incorporated Central, one of the nation's leading golf course construction firms (Rich Harvest Farms, The Glen Club, Whisper Creek, and Harborside International) was selected to translate skillfully and efficiently the vision and architectural master plans into existence.

Ground was broken and construction commenced early in 1990. Favorable weather combined with aggressive excavation, shaping and construction activities to permit initial seeding/grassing operations in late summer, followed by secondary seeding/grassing in the spring of 1991. And on May 2, 1992, PrairieView made its ceremonious and long-awaited debut to the public, one day after the commemoration of its clubhouse facility.

COURSE CONSTRUCTION HIGHLIGHTS

• 200,000 cubic yards of dirt movement/excavation
• four miles of drainage pipe installed
• six miles of irrigation pipe installed
• 100 miles of electrical wire installed for the irrigation system
• 575 irrigation heads installed
• eight tons of grass seed and 25 tons of fertilizer used
• three miles of erosion mats and 5000 bales of hay placed
• 40-million gallons of water used during grassing
• 150,000-square-feet of sand bunkers created
• hundreds of trees moved/relocated and planted