Argyle Country Club

Argyle Country Club has welcomed members since its founding in 1923, with a hilly 18-hole layout playing 6,500 yards to a par of 71 on rye and bentgrass. The course is known for its signature par-3 17th hole, which requires a tee shot from an extremely elevated tee over a stream and pond to a well-bunkered postage stamp green.

Argyle Country Club in Silver Spring, Maryland, traces its institutional history to 1923, when the Brightwood Caddie's Association and the Argyle Tennis Club merged to form a small club in the Northwest section of Washington, D.C., near Sherman Circle. The merged organization operated from that initial location before transitioning to the Sligo Creek area of Silver Spring, where members constructed tennis courts adjacent to a leased golf facility. In 1927, a nine-hole golf course was laid out at the Sligo Creek location by architects William Henry "Willie" Tucker Sr. and Dr. Walter S. Harban, establishing the club's first owned golf infrastructure.

The pivotal transition in Argyle's history came in 1945, when the club purchased a 150-acre property in Silver Spring that had previously served as a working dairy farm. The old barn from the farm operation was converted into a clubhouse — a piece of adaptive architecture that gave the club its early physical home at the current location. On this property, a new golf course was laid out through the collaborative work of William H. Tucker and Donald Ross, the legendary Scottish-American architect whose course portfolio across the Eastern United States represents the most significant body of work in American golf course design from the first half of the twentieth century. Ross's involvement at Argyle, while not one of his landmark commissions, reflects his sustained engagement with the Washington suburban market during the mid-1940s.

In 1960, the course underwent a significant redesign by Ed Ault and Al Jamison, a Maryland-based architectural team that was enormously active in the Chesapeake region during the postwar decades. Ault's extensive Mid-Atlantic portfolio and his partnership with Jamison brought contemporary design thinking to Argyle's course, updating the Tucker-Ross routing with revised green complexes, bunkering, and hole configurations that have shaped the course members have played since. More recent renovation work by architect Joel Weiman and builder McDonald & Sons introduced additional updates to the course, including redesigned green complexes, new bunkers, and the conversion to Ironcutter Bermuda grass — a renovation that reflected the continued evolution of the Argyle course within the competitive Washington suburban private club market. The 18-hole layout plays across the rolling terrain of Silver Spring, a community that sits at the southern edge of Montgomery County immediately north of Washington, D.C. The topographic variety of the site — the same characteristic that made the dairy farm property an attractive golf parcel in 1945 — continues to provide the natural elevation changes and directional variety that give the course its character.

Silver Spring's urban density has grown substantially around the 150-acre property since 1945, making Argyle's wooded campus an increasingly valued open space within a densely developed inner suburb. The Maryland State Golf Association lists Argyle Country Club among its member facilities, and the club has participated in state association competitions through its long history. The club's founding in a working-family context — beginning as a caddie association — distinguishes its social origins from the patrician founding stories of many comparable Maryland clubs and gives Argyle a distinctive identity within the Washington suburban private golf landscape.