At the edge of Augusta National Golf Club, where the world’s best golfers are set to tee off this week, stands one modest brick house that refuses to budge. While bulldozers cleared out an entire neighborhood to make way for the Masters’ $200 million expansion, 1112 Stanley Road remains untouched. It belongs to Elizabeth Thacker, a 92-year-old widow now living in a care home with dementia, and she still won’t sell.
Built in 1959 by Elizabeth and her late husband Herman, the three-bedroom home sits just steps from Gate 6 of the iconic course. Over the decades, Augusta National has offered inflated seven-figure sums to buy it. The Thackers turned them down every time. “Money ain’t everything,” Herman told NJ.com back in 2016. That simple conviction now stands in the way of one of the biggest land grabs in modern golf history.
A Family Stands Firm While Augusta Expands
Since 1999, Augusta National has spent roughly $200 million acquiring an extra 270 acres around the course, the Wall Street Journal reported. One by one, homes vanished. Most neighbors took the money and moved. The Thackers didn’t flinch. Today, their house sits alone on what used to be a quiet residential street, now a staging ground for thousands of golf fans.
The club hoped to use the land for more parking and hospitality areas. But the Thackers didn’t see the appeal of walking away. Even after Elizabeth moved into a care facility following her husband’s death in 2019, the family refused to let go of the property. Their grandson, professional golfer Scott Brown, grew up there. “They could never find anywhere else they wanted to go,” he told The Telegraph this week. “They fell in love with the place.”
Brown, 41, has his own history with Augusta. Despite once ranking 107th in the world and winning the 2013 Puerto Rico Open, he never qualified for the Masters. He described missing that chance as “the biggest downfall” of his career. Still, he cherishes the memory of attending the tournament with his grandfather, sitting at hole 16 every Sunday for 18 years.
The Thackers did sell one nearby property, a smaller home where Brown lived during college, to Augusta for $1.2 million. But the family home stands firm. Surrounded by manicured greens and corporate hospitality tents, it’s a quiet, aging reminder that not everything is for sale.
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