MORRISON – A public golf course that dates back to the early 1900s has been sold, all but guaranteeing that the land will be used for a different purpose.

The Prairie Ridge Golf Course, 903 W. Morris St., was sold to two Iowa businessmen. Mark Volrath owns Volrath Hardwoods, a logging company in Camanche. Volrath’s brother-in-law, Robert Holst, is the other buyer. He owns Holst Trucking and Excavating in Le Claire.

The pair bought 178 acres for $444,000 from Lajim LLC. Managers of the limited liability company are M. Kai Conway of Lake Geneva, and Javier Carreno and Olga Magdalena Jimenez Nunez, both of Morrison.

The new owners didn’t have a use in mind when they decided to buy the property, but it’s unlikely it will be reopened as a golf course.

“I really don’t have a clue about how we’ll use it, but one possibility is for hunting,” Volrath said Tuesday. “We thought about fixing up the clubhouse for hunters and maybe selling it to someone who loves to hunt.”

Some of the land on the backside of the course also could be made available for housing development.

“There are some nice lots where houses could be built, but some of it could be farmed, too,” Volrath said.

The golf course was started in 1918 as Prairie Morrison Country Club, then a nine-hole private course. It was sold twice in the 1990s and renamed Sunset Woods. It was closed for several years before Lowell Beggs and Carreno bought it in 2007. After the course was rebuilt and the clubhouse remodeled, the course was reopened a year later as Prairie Ridge Golf Course.

The course and the Oak Room restaurant closed again after the 2015 golf season. Beggs, who died in 2016, also owned Silver Ridge Golf Course in Oregon for 20 years.

Beggs filed a federal lawsuit in 2013, in an attempt to force GE to get rid of contamination from its Morrison plant that had made its way beneath the Prairie Ridge soil. The fight lasted for years, ending March 4, when the federal appellate court upheld a lower court ruling that sided with GE.

The court ruled that the company couldn’t be forced to remove the affected soil because the Illinois EPA had only ordered GE to contain the contamination.