Chicago Golf Club

Chicago Golf Club is one of the five founding member clubs of the United States Golf Association and holds the distinction of being the first 18-hole golf course in North America. Its Seth Raynor-redesigned layout remains a deeply revered courses in the world.

Chicago Golf Club stands as a foundational institution in American golf, its origins inseparable from the extraordinary life of Charles Blair Macdonald. Born in 1855 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, to a Scottish father and Canadian mother, Macdonald was sent to the University of St Andrews in Scotland in 1872 at the age of sixteen. There, under the tutelage of Old Tom Morris himself, the young man developed a deep understanding of golf and its strategic principles. He played the Old Course at St Andrews alongside many of the leading golfers of the era, including Young Tom Morris, absorbing the nuances of links architecture that would shape his life's work. When Macdonald returned to Chicago in 1874, he carried with him a reverence for Scottish golf that would ultimately transform the American sporting landscape. In 1892, Macdonald persuaded a group of associates to take up the game and founded the Chicago Golf Club. He laid out nine rudimentary holes on a property in Downers Grove, Illinois, creating the first golf course west of the Allegheny Mountains. The response was immediate and enthusiastic. By the spring of 1893, Macdonald had expanded the layout to eighteen holes, making it the first eighteen-hole golf course in North America. The course at Downers Grove proved so popular that the membership soon outgrew it. In 1894, the club purchased a 200-acre parcel of the Patrick farm in Wheaton, Illinois, for a then-considerable sum of $28,000. Macdonald selected the site because its vast rolling hills covered with native grasses reminded him of Scotland. The new eighteen-hole course opened for play on May 1, 1895, stretching approximately 6,500 yards, and it has remained on this ground ever since. Chicago Golf Club was instrumental in the founding of the United States Golf Association. On December 22, 1894, representatives from five charter clubs -- Newport Country Club, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, The Country Club (Brookline), Saint Andrew's Golf Club, and Chicago Golf Club -- gathered in New York City to establish the Amateur Golf Association of the United States, later renamed the USGA. Macdonald served as the organization's first vice president and won the inaugural U.S.

Amateur Championship in 1895. That same year, he brought James Foulis from St Andrews, Scotland, to serve as the club's first professional. Foulis would go on to win the 1896 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. The club's championship legacy began early and has endured across three centuries. Chicago Golf Club hosted the U.S. Open in 1897, 1900, and 1911. The 1897 championship, just the third U.S. Open ever contested, was won by Scotsman Joe Lloyd with a 36-hole score of 162. In 1900, the great Harry Vardon captured the title during his celebrated American exhibition tour, winning with a score of 313 over 72 holes. The 1911 championship produced a historic result when nineteen-year-old John McDermott of Philadelphia became the first American-born player to win the U.S. Open, prevailing in an eighteen-hole, three-way playoff. McDermott remains the youngest U.S. Open champion in the tournament's history. The club also hosted four U.S. Amateur Championships (1897, 1905, 1909, and 1912) and the 1903 U.S.

Women's Amateur during this early period. The course that members play today bears little resemblance to Macdonald's original 1895 layout. Between 1921 and 1923, Seth Raynor -- Macdonald's protege and collaborator -- undertook a complete redesign of the golf course. Raynor, who had begun his career as a civil engineer assisting Macdonald at the National Golf Links of America, had become a distinguished architect in his own right. His redesign of Chicago Golf Club employed the template hole philosophy that he and Macdonald championed: the belief that approximately twenty-five great hole designs existed in the game, drawn from the finest examples on the historic links of Scotland and England, and that these designs could be adapted and replicated on American soil. The new course opened in June 1923 and featured a remarkable collection of template holes. The second hole follows the Road Hole concept inspired by the seventeenth at St Andrews. The third is a Biarritz, modeled on the famous hole at the Biarritz golf course in France with its deep swale bisecting the green. The fourth employs the Cape design, demanding a heroic carry over a hazard on a diagonal. The seventh is a Redan, inspired by the celebrated fifteenth at North Berwick, with its green angled away from the tee and protected by a deep bunker at the front left. The twelfth is a Punchbowl, with its green set in a natural amphitheater that funnels approach shots toward the putting surface. The thirteenth follows the Strath concept, and the sixth features a Double Plateau green. Together, these holes form a comprehensive encyclopedia of strategic golf design, making Chicago Golf Club a living textbook of the template school of architecture. The Walker Cup has twice come to Wheaton. In 1928, the United States team defeated Great Britain and Ireland in the biennial amateur competition, with Bobby Jones setting the course record of 66 during the matches. The Walker Cup returned in 2005, when the American team again prevailed on Chicago Golf Club's grounds.

The club hosted the U.S. Senior Amateur in 1979, adding another USGA championship to its ledger. In 2018, Chicago Golf Club wrote a new chapter in its championship story by hosting the inaugural U.S. Senior Women's Open. England's Laura Davies dominated the event, firing rounds that included a spectacular 66 en route to a sixteen-under-par total of 276 and a commanding ten-stroke victory over Juli Inkster. The championship demonstrated that the Raynor design could challenge and reward the game's finest players regardless of era. The club's future championship calendar is equally significant. In November 2022, the USGA announced that Chicago Golf Club would host the 2033 U.S. Women's Open and the 2036 Walker Cup. These will be the thirteenth and fourteenth USGA championships played at the club, extending its record of hosting national championships across three different centuries -- the 1890s and 1900s, the 2000s and 2010s, and the 2030s. No other venue in America can claim such a span. Chicago Golf Club remains a deeply private institution, its membership devoted to preserving both the Raynor architecture and the club's singular place in the history of American golf. The flat to gently rolling terrain of the western Chicago suburbs, so different from the Scottish links that inspired Macdonald, has proven to be an ideal canvas for template hole design, with Raynor's bunkering and green complexes providing all the strategic interest that the natural topography does not. The course plays to approximately 6,600 yards, modest by modern standards, yet its design continues to test the judgment and skill of every golfer who walks its fairways. As the birthplace of eighteen-hole golf in North America, a founding member of the USGA, and the permanent home of some of the finest template holes in existence, Chicago Golf Club occupies a position in American golf that is unmatched and irreplaceable.