The First Golf Course in America, and the Oldest Still in Play

The earliest golf in America predates every club on the usual lists by more than a century. Golf was played at Harleston Green in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1780s, and the South Carolina Golf Club existed from 1786 to organise it. Scottish merchants brought the game with them to a port city that traded heavily with Britain, which is the ordinary explanation and almost certainly the right one.

An earlier trace than the club survives in a shipping record. In 1739 golf equipment was delivered in South Carolina to a man named William Wallace, which is not evidence of a course, or of a club, or even of a round being played, but it is the earliest documentary sign of golf reaching the colonies and it predates Harleston Green by nearly half a century. It is the kind of fact worth keeping precisely because it answers a narrower question than the one usually asked: the earliest proof of golf in America is a delivery note, not a place.

It is left out of the record for a reason that has nothing to do with doubt about whether it happened. The club did not survive the early nineteenth century and no ground remains. When a question about the oldest golf course in the US is asked, it is nearly always asked about somewhere a person could play today, so the answer skips a hundred years and restarts in the 1880s. That is a defensible convention, but it is a convention, and it is worth knowing it is there.

The gap itself is the historically interesting part. Golf arrived in America, took hold in one city, and then died out completely for roughly a century before returning. Nothing connects the Charleston players of the 1780s to the New York clubs of the 1880s. The history of golf in America is two separate beginnings, not one continuous line.

For the modern era the earliest layout usually credited is Oakhurst Links in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, dated 1884. Nine holes were laid out there by a group of Scottish and English expatriates, and it has a strong claim to being the first golf course in America in the plain sense of ground set aside for the game.

The objection is continuity. Play ceased around 1910 and the course lay unused for decades before being restored, so it fails any test that requires continuous operation. A course that stops being a course for most of a century sits awkwardly in a list that most readers assume means "still there".

Foxburg Country Club in Foxburg, Pennsylvania answers that objection directly, dating itself to 1887 and claiming continuous play ever since. Its weakness is evidentiary rather than logical: The founding date rests on local rather than national records, and the club was not among the bodies that formed the USGA.

The first eighteen-hole course in America is a cleaner record, because eighteen holes is a fact rather than a definition. Chicago Golf Club laid out the first full eighteen in 1893. Even here there is a wrinkle worth stating: The eighteen of 1893 was at Belmont; the club moved to Wheaton in 1895, so the eighteen that exists today is not the one that set the record.

Read down the years and the shape of the thing appears: 1884, 1887, 1888, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1893. American golf did not grow; it detonated. Seven of the courses that define the sport's establishment in the United States were laid out inside a decade, and five of those seven within three years of each other.

The oldest continuously operating club in America, as distinct from the oldest course, is Saint Andrew's Golf Club, 1888. That is the answer most reference works give, and the distinction between club and course is what makes it survive scrutiny: It is a club record rather than a course record — the membership has moved its course more than once since 1888.

Shinnecock Hills Golf Club holds two records that are rarely disputed: the first incorporated club in the country and the first purpose-built clubhouse, both in 1891. A clubhouse sounds like a footnote and is not: it marks the point at which golf in America stopped being a set of holes in a field and became an institution with property, officers and a balance sheet.

By 1910 there were more than 250 golf clubs in the United States, which is the scale that made a governing body necessary rather than merely desirable: a game played at two dozen clubs can settle its own disputes, and a game played at two hundred and fifty cannot.

In 1894 five clubs (Saint Andrew's Golf Club, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, Chicago Golf Club, The Country Club and Newport Country Club) formed the United States Golf Association. The five clubs formed the body that standardised the rules and the amateur definition in the United States. Their founding dates are the reason those five names dominate every 'oldest course' list.

This is the real reason the same handful of names recurs in every list of the oldest golf courses in the US. Being early mattered, but being early and in the room in 1894 mattered more: those five clubs wrote the rules, defined the amateur, and ran the first national championships in 1895 at Newport. Clubs of a comparable age that were not part of that meeting, Foxburg and Oakhurst among them, spent the next century arguing their case from outside the record they were absent from.

So when the question is when was the first golf course built in America, the useful answer is a date plus a definition: 1786 for the earliest golf of any kind, 1884 for the first ground laid out, 1887 or 1888 depending on whether the test is course or club, and 1893 for the first eighteen holes. Anyone offering a single year without saying which question they are answering has quietly chosen one for you.

Almost every dispute above turns on the word continuous, and it is doing more work than it appears to. Three different things can be continuous: the club as an organisation, play on a particular piece of ground, and the ground itself as a course. A claim that names only one of the three is not wrong, but it is answering a narrower question than the reader is usually asking.

Saint Andrew's is continuous in the first sense and not the second: the organisation has an unbroken line from 1888, but the members have moved the course. Foxburg claims the second. Oakhurst has the earliest claim on the third and loses on the first two, because the ground existed but nobody played it for most of a century.

Nothing resolves this, and that is the point worth taking away. A reader asking when the first golf course was built in America is entitled to a date; the useful reply names the date and the test it satisfies, so the reader can tell whether it is the test they meant.

The tests above decide which claim answers which question. What decides how much weight a claim carries is duller and more useful: the kind of document the date rests on. Three kinds appear in this subject, and they are not equal.

The strongest is a public filing. Shinnecock Hills was incorporated in 1891, and incorporation leaves a record outside the club that made it, which is why its claim to be the first incorporated club, and the first with a purpose-built clubhouse, is the only one on this page that nothing seriously contests. Next comes an organisation's own continuous paperwork: minutes, membership rolls, competition results. Saint Andrew's 1888 line is of this kind, and it is strong on the club and silent on the ground. Weakest is a date established locally and never tested nationally, which is the objection to Foxburg's 1887, and a date reconstructed after the fact, which is the difficulty with Oakhurst's 1884: the links closed in 1912, so the ground was out of use during the decades when national record-keeping was being built. A century later, in 2012, the site passed to a new owner who announced a restoration. The record classes Oakhurst as restored rather than continuous, and that distinction is what costs it the claim: this page keeps running into courses whose case rests on a beginning rather than on an unbroken line.

That last point is why 1894 keeps reappearing. Before the USGA there was no body whose records covered more than one club, so a claim from before it can only be as good as whoever happened to write something down.