CHAPIN, S.C. — Slinging a pickax under a blazing sun as he dug a hole behind the ninth green at Timberlake Country Club, Michael Kletter, 68, conceded that this was not the golf course retirement life he had envisioned.

“No, I didn’t dream of manual labor,” Kletter, a transplanted New Yorker who is a member of the club, not of its maintenance crew, said as he planted a 6-foot fern. “But the recession changed everything. The golf course was in danger of closing. It’s not a golf community without a golf course. We had to do something.”

So Kletter joined about 300 other Timberlake members in a consortium that bought the financially distressed country club outside Columbia, S.C.

But to make the arrangement work, the members did something that would have been unheard-of five years ago: They agreed to do much of the work to operate and maintain the club.

On a recent hot weekday morning, about 35 members were on the course raking bunkers, planting grass, trimming tee boxes, weeding, digging holes for new bushes and even brandishing chain saws in a work crew that felled three ailing 50-foot trees.

“I know the old golf community culture was a life of leisure,” said Jon Pierce, a retired professor leaning on his shovel after planting tee box grass. “But a lot of those golf courses are going bankrupt. Being leisurely has left people with a backyard of knee-high weeds instead of a beautiful golf course.

“The economic reality is that we had to protect our lifestyle and investment.”

With dozens of golf courses closing nationwide because of failed real estate developments, the Timberlake club is an example of a new model in the industry. Rather than watch home values plummet as a lush golf course is abandoned, nearby residents are banding together to buy the course — even if it means running it themselves.

In the wealthiest communities, this process often means that 10 or 20 of the most affluent member-residents write checks to save the course. In the case of another South Carolina golf community 35 miles from Timberlake, the WildeWood and Woodcreek clubs in Columbia, 574 members contributed an average of $4,700 to execute the purchase. Then scores of those members took on administrative duties that became like part-time jobs.

And in the case of Timberlake Country Club and others like it in states flush with retirement golf communities — North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Arizona and Nevada — the members have donned work gloves and wielded hedge clippers and weed whackers to help keep the courses green and the clubs’ revenue ledgers in the black.

“The members’ sweat equity cuts our maintenance budget in half,” said Timberlake’s general manager, David Madden, whose maintenance budget is about $250,000, or about one-sixth of annual revenue.

Cutting down those three Timberlake trees, for example, would have cost about $1,800 if done professionally. Earlier this year, when it came time to construct a new fitness center, grill and card room in the clubhouse there, one member donated the wallboard and other members installed it. When the club decided it needed rolling bar stations for outside parties, two members built them by hand.

In 2011, the club president, Julie Nelson, counted nearly 3,000 hours of members’ labor.

The club does pay a small maintenance staff for mowing fairways and greens, and the heavy-duty labor performed by members is done under the supervision of the course superintendent.

But the hands-on ownership attitude runs deep. With the Timberlake community about 70 percent retirees, it is common for four or five couples living on a particular hole to adopt the hole. They keep an eye on the flower beds around the tee boxes, cut and trim the edges of sand traps, weed the fringe around the green and remove loose debris, tree limbs or trash from the fairways and rough.

If they need a reminder of what is at stake, they look east toward the ocean, where 22 courses in the once-booming golf haven of Myrtle Beach have all but vanished in the last decade, with young trees sprouting through the old greens.

“I hope the economy improves and the members might not have to do all this extra work,” Madden said. “But right now, it’s letting us survive and prosper.”

The number of clubs being taken over by members may be a small percentage of America’s 16,000 courses — perhaps no more than 400 — but industry experts say it is a growing sector of the golf marketplace. And many of the clubs, like Timberlake, are open to the public as well.

The members at the private WildeWood and Woodcreek bought the clubs in 2009 for $4.2 million. Bill McDougall, a retired airline pilot who spearheaded the purchase, said intensive member interest had forever changed the way his clubs, and other clubs, would do business.

“Only the top 5 percent of clubs — the very most high-end clubs — will be able to run things as they did five or 10 years ago,” said McDougall, 65. “The members now want to be involved, they want to help set priorities and they want things streamlined.”

Not every member takeover has been a success story, with dozens of failed ventures and abandoned golf courses. Northgate Golf Course, a top-rated layout in Reno, Nev., that closed in 2009, is now overgrown, more a home to bunnies than to bogeys.

Not far away, the developer of D’Andrea Golf Club in Sparks, Nev., lost money year after year without the revenue that a robust housing market was expected to provide. In March, Will Gustafson, the managing partner of the ownership group, asked the D’Andrea homeowners association for a $28 monthly maintenance fee to keep the golf course open.

The homeowners voted against paying the fee. The next day, Gustafson closed the course. Within weeks, the fairways were burned from the heat. At night, bikers were doing wheelies on the greens and vandals invaded the majestic clubhouse set high on a bluff.

Nick Oddo, a retired real estate executive who lives nearby, quickly organized a neighborhood group to raise $90,000 to pay for the temporary watering of the golf course. He brought in the local Guardian Angels at night for security. Oddo is still trying to come up with $5 million to keep D’Andrea afloat.

“Not what I expected in retirement,” the 82-year-old Oddo said. “But the golf course is a jewel we shouldn’t let go. In life, things can’t always be about the money; otherwise, we would not have any museums, libraries or playgrounds.”

Back in South Carolina, the Timberlake club member Linda Hamel, 68, replaced divots in the grass along the 17th hole and helped plant flowers near the tee box.

“When it’s your golf course, it doesn’t feel like work,” Hamel said. “You know, late in life, we’ll sit on the porch in our rockers, look out at the fairways and say: ‘We did that. And it was worth it.’ ”