Burlington Country Club

Overlooking Lake Champlain in Vermont's largest city, Burlington Country Club features a 1924 Ross design with lake and mountain views. The course plays on varied terrain with the Adirondacks visible across the water.

Burlington Country Club is among the architecturally significant private golf clubs in New England, home to the only Donald Ross design in Vermont and a course that Ross himself reportedly considered among his best work. Founded in 1924 and celebrating its centennial in 2024, the club stands on one of Burlington's most commanding hilltop sites with iconic views of Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains. The club was founded in 1924 under the leadership of Charles L. Woodbury, a distinguished University of Vermont graduate who envisioned a club that would rival any in New England.

Woodbury and his fellow founders acquired 150 acres from the estate of Henry Holt, the New York publisher, whose Fairholt property occupied the high ground above Burlington with sweeping views of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains of New York across the water. To design the course, the founders engaged Donald J. Ross, the Scottish-born architect whose body of work — including Pinehurst No. 2, Seminole, and hundreds of other courses across America — made him the most influential golf course designer of the Golden Age. Ross created a course at Burlington that has been noted for a distinctive structural feature found nowhere else in his approximately 400 designs: the two nines are laid out in counter-clockwise concentric circles, a configuration unique among Ross courses and one that creates a playing experience where both nines return to the clubhouse.

The Ross design takes full advantage of the Burlington hilltop terrain, with the elevated site providing constant views of Lake Champlain and the New York shoreline that frame the playing experience. The course features the hallmarks of Ross's design philosophy — crowned and contoured greens that demand precise approach angles, strategic bunkering that rewards well-positioned tee shots, and routing that finds maximum variety and interest in the available terrain. Burlington Country Club has hosted Vermont Golf Association championships and various invitational events throughout its century of operation, serving as a competitive venue for the state's finest golfers. The Ross course provides a genuine championship test that has challenged generations of Vermont golfers and rewarded those who develop mastery of its subtleties.

The centennial celebration of 2024 provided an occasion to reflect on a hundred years of golf at one of Vermont's most storied clubs. The membership has invested in the maintenance and preservation of the Ross design over the decades, resisting alterations that might compromise the integrity of what remains among the significant historical golf artifacts in the Green Mountain State. The clubhouse sits on the hilltop property with views that make it among the dramatic settings of any New England private club, and the dining and social facilities have been updated to provide contemporary amenities while preserving the historic character of the institution. Today Burlington Country Club stands as the preeminent private golf institution of the Lake Champlain region, a club whose Donald Ross design and century of history place it among the significant golf destinations of New England.