I believe this is also where Augusta National gets “sand” for the bunkers there. The ultra white color looks better on TV.
I spent 4 years (March through October, 2004-07) hauling various colors of sand, by bulk dump trailer load, out of the sand filled Mississippi river floodplain near Muscatine, IA to golf courses as far as 200 miles away.
But those sand pits had no white sand. And only a few courses wanted it, because every little thing that wasn’t white stood out. If a golfer clubbed some nearby divot into a white sand bunker, the groundskeeper had a harder job making it look ‘pure’ again (golf is truly the vainest of sports, imo).
To please customer courses that wanted white sand, we would get that from silica mines along the Illinois river, about 30 miles west of Joliet.