“My mother was very unassuming,” says Fraser’s Canadian-born and raised daughter, Sandra Carwardine. “It wasn’t until after Mother’s death, when I went to Georgia for her induction into the state’s Sports Hall of Fame [in 1978] that I began to realize the full extent of her accomplishments. People couldn’t do enough for me. It was then I got a clue about how revered she had been.”

Alexandra Stirling was born in Atlanta in 1897, the middle of three children. In 1908, her father, a successful, Scottish-born ophthalmologist who also doubled as the British Consul in Georgia, moved the family to a house on the edge of the new East Lake course. Among the neighbors were Col. Robert Jones and his family, which included a young son called Bobby. 

Alexa was five years older than Bobby and the two shared a big sister-little brother relationship, remaining friends until his death in 1972. They both took lessons from East Lake’s legendary golf pro Stewart Maiden, who taught them the free-flowing Carnoustie swing.

Along with fellow East Lake juniors Perry Adair and Frank Meador, they played in their first organized tournament when Bobby was 6 and Alexa was 11. It was a six-hole stroke-play event and Meador’s mother provided a small silver cup to go to the winner. Jones was awarded the three-inch-high trophy but later wrote that he always felt guilty about accepting it.

In Down the Fairway, a book co-written by O.B. Keeler, he said, “I’d love to go over that round of six holes again and check it up. Because I’ll always believe that Alexa won that cup.”

It wasn’t long before both Jones and Stirling had made the jump from neighborhood to national tournaments. In 1914, Alexa played in her first Women’s Amateur, losing in the first round to Georgianna Bishop. The next year, she advanced to the semifinals before being edged out in extra holes by the eventual champion, Florence Vanderbeck.

Finally in 1916, just after her 19th birthday, Stirling won her first national title, defeating Mildred Caverly, 2 and 1, in the final at Belmont Springs Country Club in Waverley, Mass. To mark the victory, the Atlanta Athletic Club, which owned East Lake at the time, threw a celebratory dinner. The club gave Stirling a silver watch engraved with the words, “By the Atlanta Athletic Club. Upon Her Return As National Woman Golf Champion. This And A Life Membership Is Affectionately Presented To Alexandra Williamson Stirling. 1916.”

The entry of the United States into World War I put the national championships on hold for the next two years but Stirling kept busy. Although she is frequently described as having been quiet and unassuming, Stirling was far from unadventurous.

At a time when only a sprinkling of women had driver’s licenses, Stirling joined the Women’s Motor Reserve Corps and drove a truck. She earned the rank of second lieutenant. A few years later, she moved to New York and became one of the few female bond salesmen on Wall Street.

In 1917 and 1918, Stirling also crisscrossed the U.S. with East Lake club mates Jones and Adair and a top-ranked player from the Midwest named Elaine Rosenthal to raise money for the Red Cross. The foursome was dubbed the Dixie Kids and their exhibition matches were such a hit that they raised nearly $150,000. 

In his book Golf Is My Game, Jones - who was just a teenager during the tour - wrote about a particularly memorable incident: “Alexa, with whom I had grown up at East Lake, had won the Ladies Championship the year before. She was one of the truly great women players of all time. É Although I should have known that Alexa, not I, was the main attraction, I behaved very badly when my game went apart. I heaved numerous clubs, and once threw the ball away.

I read the pity in Alexa’s soft brown eyes and finally settled down, but not before I had made a complete fool of myself. That experience had the proper effect.”

After the war, Stirling picked up where she had left off, dominating the U.S. women’s golf scene by winning the 1919 Women’s Amateur with a convincing 6-and-5 victory over Margaret Gavin. She won the title again in 1920, this time beating Dorothy Campbell Hurd by the decisive score of 5 and 4. Hurd was originally from Britain and was already one of the game’s most decorated players, with three Scottish Ladies’ Championships, two Ladies’ British Amateur Championships and two U.S. Women’s Amateur wins. (She would take the U.S. Women’s Amateur again in 1924.)

In 1920, Fraser also journeyed north and won the Canadian Ladies’ Amateur, cementing her unofficial title as the game’s top woman player. Keeler, the Atlanta writer who chronicled Jones’s career, also followed Fraser’s matches and wrote glowing if paternalistic descriptions of her game. “Alexa was playing the finest feminine golf yet produced in America - slight of stature, and rather frail of hands, her shots were the finest I had ever seen a woman present.”

While Stirling’s game, especially her approach shots, were the equal of any of her contemporaries, it was her temperament that was the key to her success. She refused to allow herself to be rattled by a poor shot.

In 1921, Stirling returned to Canada to defend her title. Instead of winning another trophy, though, she won the heart of Dr. Wilbert Grieve Fraser, a Canadian physician who, like her father, was an eye specialist. After a four-year courtship, the couple married in Atlanta and moved to Ottawa.

In 1925, Fraser earned medalist honors at the U.S. Women’s Amateur by shooting a 77 at the St. Louis Country Club in Clayton, Mo. She went on to reach the final but lost to Glenna Collett Vare, who would eventually win a record six Women’s Amateur crowns and inherit Fraser’s title as “Queen of American Golf.”

After that, Fraser shifted her focus to raising her daughter and two sons. She continued to compete in national amateur championships, winning the Canadian Ladies’ title again in 1934, but played mostly social and club golf. She won the ladies’ title at her home course, Royal Ottawa Golf Club, nine times.

“Mother and Dad played once or twice a week but they never pushed golf on us kids,” recounts Carwardine. “I never got particularly good, just past the whiffing stage really.”

Her mother was pushed to play one last championship by an old friend she referred to as, “the most complicated and endearing man I have ever known.”

“In 1950, when the Women’s Amateur was being held at East Lake, Bobby Jones was acting as honorary general chairman of the Championship and he wrote Mother to ask if, for old times’ sake, she would play in the tournament,” says Carwardine. Fraser was in her 50s and years removed from having teed it up in any national competition, but she agreed to make the trip.

“Although he had started to use a wheelchair by then, Bobby drove to the train station alone to pick Mother up. I think he wanted her to remember him once more as the boy she had grown up with,” says Carwardine. “That tournament was the last time they ever saw each other.”

Perhaps inspired by Jones and the return to East Lake, Fraser made it through stroke play to reach match-play. In the first round, she met Betty MacKinnon of Dallas, Texas. The match went to the final hole. There, in a gracious display of sportsmanship, Fraser picked up her ball, allowing the younger woman to advance to the next round.

If World War I had not interrupted her run of championships, Alexa Stirling Fraser might have captured five U.S. Women’s Amateurs in a row, a record that would have raised her to the next level of golfing immortality.

Whatever her record, the acclaim she received never affected her personality or life outside of golf. “Mother was accomplished at a lot of things, besides golf, she made furniture and was a terrific musician,” says her proud daughter. “She just chose to do things quietly.”

And very, very well.