Chicago Golf Club
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Chicago Golf Club is a prestigious private golf club in Wheaton, Illinois in the United States. It is the oldest 18-hole course in North America and was one of the five clubs which founded the United States Golf Association in 1894. Its founder, Charles Blair Macdonald, won the first official U.S. Amateur Championship in 1895.
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[edit] History
Charles Blair Macdonald, known as the Father of Golf in Chicago, went to college in Scotland, where he learned to play the game. He brought back a set of clubs, and in early 1892, on the Lake Forest estate of a friend, C.B. Farwell, and his son, Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, laid out seven informal golf holes on an interesting piece of lakefront property known as "Bluff's Edge." His group of friends were fascinated by the new game and demanded a course be built on a dedicated site. In late spring of 1892, Macdonald passed around a hat with his friends, who contributed $10 each for a total of two or three hundred dollars. MacDonald spent that money in laying out a nine hole course, about 23 miles west of Chicago's Union Station, on the stock farm of A. Haddon Smith at Belmont, located one block north of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad line. This was to become the first golf course built west of the Alleghenies, and second to Shinnecock Hills in Long Island, New York, which opened 12 holes in 1891.
Macdonald, who still had contacts in Scotland, next cabled the Royal Liverpool Golf Club and ordered six sets of clubs. As soon as they arrived, his newfound associates were soon bitten by the golf bug.
In the spring of 1893, Macdonald wrote in his c.1925 book Scotland's Gift -- Golf, that he increased the number of holes at Belmont to 18, creating the first 18-hole golf course in North America. On July 18, 1893, the charter was granted for the Chicago Golf Club.
The club became so popular that, in 1894, the members bought a piece of property to build an improved 18-hole course. They purchased a 200-acre parcel of the Patrick farm in Wheaton, for a then-considerable sum of $28,000, which became "a first class 18-hole course of 6,500 yards." The site was chosen for its rolling hills covered with native grasses, which reminded Macdonald of Scotland.
Macdonald designed the links-style layout himself; since he was a chronic slicer, he routed the holes so that both nines would play in clockwise fashion so that he would stay out of trouble. Once the private land adjacent to the course became developed, a new rule was needed for errant golf balls leaving the premises. The United States Golf Association Rule of Golf for "Out Of Bounds" (27-1) had its origin at Chicago Golf Club.
Around 1902, the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Railway constructed an electrified third-rail railroad between the far western terminus of the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad Co. at 52nd Street (now Laramie Avenue) in Chicago, and the Fox River towns of Aurora and Elgin. The branch line splitting to Aurora from downtown Wheaton traveled just past the main entrance to Chicago Golf Club, where was built a splendid brick station. A large majority of the club members commuted from downtown Chicago, and on weekends and special occasions a luxuriously-appointed wood-paneled club car with a well-stocked bar and linen-tablecloth dinner service was employed to ferry golfers out to the Chicago Golf Club. At the club's station was a siding, where the club car was parked until it was needed for the evening return trip.
After the Chicago Golf Club vacated the Belmont location, Herbert J. Tweedie, a one-time member of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, formed the Belmont Golf Club, of which the charter was granted in 1899. By that time, however, the course was back to nine holes. The original site has remained a golf course through the years, passing through several owners, and now is owned and operated as a public facility by the Downers Grove Park District.
(History collected from Chicagoland Golf magazine, April 1992, by Phil Kosin)
[edit] Tournaments
Important tournaments played at Chicago Golf Club:
[edit] U.S. Open
[edit] U.S. Amateur
- 1897 H.J. Whigham
- 1903 Bessie Anthony (women's)
- 1905 H. Chandler Egan
- 1909 Robert Gardner
- 1912 Jerome Travers
- 1979 William C. Campbell (senior)
[edit] Walker Cup
- 1928 United States 11, Great Britain & Ireland 1
- 2005 United States 12½, Great Britain & Ireland 11½
[edit] Western Junior
- 1992 John Curley
