Bend Golf Club

Bend Golf Club is a private club in Bend, Oregon, with origins dating to 1925 when Chandler Egan designed the original nine holes on land donated by Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company. Now stretching to more than 7,000 yards across 18 holes framed by ponderosa pines, the club is one of the oldest and most storied in Central Oregon.

Bend Golf Club is the oldest private golf institution in central Oregon, tracing its origins to March 1925 when the club purchased a 172-acre parcel of forested land from the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company. Within two months of that purchase, the developers had shaped the first nine holes and hosted an inaugural tournament — a pace of construction that reflected the enthusiasm of a growing Bend business community for establishing permanent recreational facilities. Legendary architect H. Chandler Egan designed those original nine holes, which today form the club's back nine. Egan, who won the 1904 and 1905 U.S. Amateur championships before turning to course design, brought an accomplished competitive golfer's perspective to the routing through the ponderosa pine forest above the Deschutes River plateau. The club was established during Bend's era as a center for the central Oregon lumber industry, when the Shevlin-Hixon and Brooks-Scanlon mills made the city among the productive timber producers in the Pacific Northwest. The prosperity of the timber industry created a professional class in Bend that sought quality recreational facilities, and the country club provided golf with a permanent private home in the community. For nearly five decades, Bend Golf Club operated as a nine-hole facility before expansion became possible. In 1973, Bob Baldock designed the second nine, bringing the club to its current 18-hole configuration.

Baldock was a prolific northern California-based architect who designed dozens of courses across the western United States during the postwar decades. His front nine integrated with Egan's original routing to create a complete championship layout through the ponderosa pine terrain characteristic of the Bend area. In the 1990s, architect William Robinson undertook a significant redesign of the course, installing his characteristic symmetrical mounding and adding extensive behind-the-green bunkering that tightened approach requirements throughout the layout. Robinson's work gave the course a more defined and strategically demanding character while preserving the forest setting that distinguishes Bend Golf Club from the newer open-terrain courses that have proliferated in the region. Dan Hixson returned to the course in 2013 and 2018 for additional renovation work, including removal of trees that had grown to constrain playing corridors — a common challenge at older tree-lined courses.

The 2018 renovation also coincided with a name change back to the original Bend Golf Club, reestablishing the club's historic identity. As Bend transformed from a small logging and ranching town into among the celebrated outdoor recreation destinations in the American West, Bend Golf Club remained the traditional center of private golf in the community — a club whose history parallels the full arc of Bend's remarkable development.