Margaret Curtis

Margaret Curtis (October 8, 1883 – December 24, 1965) was an American golf and tennis champion and lifelong social worker.

From the Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts area, she was the youngest of ten children. Her father was a colonel in the Union Army cavalry during the American Civil War. Her brother James Freeman Curtis became a lawyer in New York City, and was the Assistant United States Secretary of the Treasury under President William Howard Taft. Her cousin Laurence Curtis, who served as the second President of the United States Golf Association in 1897–98, encouraged the family to take up the game of golf. As a result, Margaret and her sister Harriot began playing golf at a young age and as young ladies became members of the Women's Golf Association of Massachusetts. Founded in 1900, it was the first state women's golf association in the United States.

In 1897, 13-year-old Curtis qualified fourth in her first appearance at the U.S. Women's Amateur. In 1906 her sister Harriot won the Championship. Although health problems had prevented Margaret from competing for several years, she captured her first of three U.S. championships in 1907 by beating her sister in the finals. That year she played in England and in a stroke-play tournament at Walton Heath, near London, she was leading playing partner May Hezlet by five stokes going into the final hole. Curtis hit her drive into gorse bush, a very spiny and dense evergreen shrub common throughout western Europe but unfamiliar to an American. Curtis ended up taking a disastrous 13 on the hole to lose the tournament.

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