Bald Peak Colony Club

Perched above Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire's Lakes Region, Bald Peak Colony Club offers a Ross design with spectacular lake and mountain views, dramatic elevation changes, and a routing that descends from hilltop to lakeside. The course is one of New England's most scenic private club experiences.

Bald Peak Colony Club opened on August 1, 1921, on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire — among the scenically spectacular settings for a private golf club in the entire northeastern United States. The club was developed by Thomas Gustav Plant, a self-made French-Canadian industrialist who had made his fortune in shoe manufacturing and was among the most prominent philanthropic figures in early twentieth-century New Hampshire. Plant chose this lakeside site in what was then the small township of Moultonborough for its combination of elevated terrain, mature forest, and the incomparable backdrop of Lake Winnipesaukee — at approximately 72 square miles, one of the largest lakes in New England. To design the golf course, Plant engaged his friend Donald Ross, the Dornoch-born architect who had by 1921 become the most sought-after golf course designer in America.

Ross and Plant's personal relationship gave the Bald Peak project an intimacy that distinguished it from Ross's more commercial commissions. The course they created together uses the natural terrain of the lakeside hillsides to create holes with dramatic elevation changes and views of the lake that appear and disappear through the surrounding forest. Ross's design follows his characteristic philosophy: natural landforms define the routing, greens are raised and crowned to shed bad approaches, and bunkers are positioned to penalize the poorly directed shot rather than to create artificial difficulty. In 1921, Bald Peak was one of three courses Ross completed simultaneously, along with Mid-Pines Resort in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and Teugega Country Club in Rome, New York. The club's most remarkable institutional distinction came in recognition of the quality and integrity of the Ross design and the club's overall historic significance. Bald Peak Colony Club was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a distinct example of a rural country club established in the 1920s, making it one of only a small number of golf clubs anywhere in the United States to receive this federal recognition. The National Park Service's recognition noted that Bald Peak is the most intact historic golf club in New Hampshire and the only one situated on a lake or accompanied by historic residences. In recognition of the club's architectural importance, a comprehensive restoration was undertaken by golf course architects Ron Forse and Jim Nagle, specialists in historic Ross restorations who have restored or renovated numerous Ross designs across the northeastern United States.

The Forse-Nagle restoration at Bald Peak addressed decades of accumulated modifications that had softened or obscured Ross's original design intentions, returning the green complexes, bunker configurations, and overall playing character of the course to closer alignment with what Ross and Plant created together in 1921. The club continues to operate as one of the Lakes Region's most historically significant private institutions, drawing members from the summer communities that have anchored Lake Winnipesaukee's shoreline for more than a century.