Blue Hill Country Club in Canton features a Skip Wogan-designed 18-hole championship course that has hosted both the 1956 PGA Championship and multiple LPGA Tour events. The 27-hole facility—rounded out by a Phil Wogan 9-hole Challenger course added in 1961—offers a storied competition records of any club in Massachusetts.
History
Blue Hill Country Club in Canton, Massachusetts was founded in 1925 under circumstances that reflect a troubling chapter in New England social history. The club was established as a Jewish-only membership organization at a time when Jewish golfers were systematically excluded from the other prominent private clubs in the Boston area, and the founding generation built Blue Hill as the response to that exclusion — creating a club that would provide the social and competitive golf experience denied to them elsewhere. Eugene "Skip" Wogan received the commission for the championship course, which opened in 1925. Wogan was a somewhat obscure architect who had built a handful of courses in the Boston region; earlier in his career he had worked as an assistant professional under Donald Ross at Essex County Club, and Ross's influence on Wogan's design philosophy is evident in the championship course's strategic character. The course reflects the Ross tradition of positioning greens to create approach challenges that reward precise placement and penalize approaches that miss to the wrong side.In 1961, Wogan's son Phil designed a second 9-hole Challenger Course at Blue Hill, extending the facility and giving members an alternative playing option. Together the championship and challenger courses established Blue Hill as a two-course operation serving an active membership community located 17 miles south of downtown Boston on the South Shore. The club's most significant historical moment came in August 1956 when Blue Hill hosted the 38th PGA Championship — played in match-play format, as was then the custom — won by Jack Burke Jr. with a 3 and 2 victory over Ted Kroll in the final. Burke had already won the Masters that April, making 1956 his finest major-winning season. Hosting the PGA Championship was an extraordinary achievement for a club with Blue Hill's relatively modest origins, and the event placed the championship course in national conversation as one of the stronger layouts in New England. Notably, the 1956 edition proved to be the penultimate PGA Championship contested in match-play format before the switch to stroke play in 1958, and it remains the only time the PGA Championship has been played in Massachusetts. From 1991 through 1997, the course hosted the PING/Welch's Championship stop on the LPGA Tour, adding women's professional golf to the club's tournament legacy across seven consecutive years. In 2003, Ron Pritchard completed a restoration of both courses, bringing the layouts back toward their original design intentions after decades of maintenance had softened or eliminated features that Wogan and his son had originally incorporated. Pritchard, who specializes in Donald Ross restorations, applied a similar reverence for original design intent to his Blue Hill work, recovering bunkers that had been grassed over and restoring green contours that had been modified. The club faced financial difficulties in the years prior to 2015, carrying approximately $5 million in longstanding debt. In early 2016, Concert Golf Partners acquired Blue Hill Country Club after the board voted 16-1 in favor and the membership ratified the decision unanimously. The sale stabilized the club's finances and led to a reduction in annual dues. The mid-2000s had also seen the club open its membership to golfers of all backgrounds, finally removing the restrictions that had defined its original founding conditions.