Belmont Golf Club

Downers Grove Golf Club is the birthplace of American golf architecture — C.B. Macdonald designed this nine-hole course in 1892 as the original home of the Chicago Golf Club before it relocated to Wheaton. Now a public facility operated by the Downers Grove Park District.

The nine-hole public golf course now operated by the Downers Grove Park District sits on ground that holds a claim unique in American sports history: it is where Charles Blair Macdonald laid out the original Chicago Golf Club in 1892, the course that became the first 18-hole golf course in the United States. That distinction makes the Downers Grove property not simply a historic site but the physical origin point of organized golf architecture in America. Macdonald, a Chicagoan who had studied golf at St. Andrews, persuaded thirty colleagues from the Chicago Club to contribute ten dollars each toward the construction of a nine-hole course on a sixty-acre stock farm owned by A. Haddow Smith, a Lanarkshire golfer who had immigrated from Scotland in 1890. The farm's Scottish owner and Macdonald's Scottish education combined to produce the first deliberately designed golf course in the region.

The original nine holes opened in 1892, and in 1893 Macdonald expanded the layout to 18 holes — making the Downers Grove site the home of the first 18-hole golf course in the United States. Chicago Golf Club was also among the five founding clubs of the United States Golf Association, established in 1894. Its charter USGA membership placed the Downers Grove property at the center of the institutional founding of American golf governance, connecting the land to both the architectural and organizational origins of the game in this country. The club itself moved to its current Wheaton location in 1895 as Macdonald developed the more ambitious layout that would become the permanent home of Chicago Golf Club. The Downers Grove property continued as a golf course after the club's departure, operated under various arrangements through the decades. In 1968, the Downers Grove Park District purchased the course, ensuring its continuation as a public facility.

In 2023, the course was renamed Belmont Golf Club to honor the historical identity of the site while updating its public identity. The nine-hole layout that golfers play today bears little resemblance to what Macdonald laid out in 1892 — more than 130 years of maintenance, modification, and adaptation have altered the course substantially from its original form. But the land itself remains in continuous golf use since that founding year, and the public course operated by the park district preserves access to ground that every American golfer with an appreciation of the game's history should know. The Downers Grove site is, in the most literal sense, where American golf began. Downers Grove Golf Club plays approximately 2,800 yards on its nine-hole layout — a compact design whose historical significance derives not from its yardage but from the ground itself. The Downers Grove site is recognized as the location of America's first formal 18-hole golf course, laid out in 1892 by Charles Blair Macdonald, whose later work at National Golf Links of America would define the standards of American course design.

The present nine-hole municipal layout operates on a portion of that original ground, connecting the Downers Grove Park District's public golf program directly to the origins of American golf as an organized sport. The facility's historical markers and interpretive programming have made it a site of genuine pilgrimage for golfers who understand the game's American origins. The park district's management of the course ensures that access to this historically significant ground remains democratic and open — available to any golfer who wishes to walk the land where the game's American history began. The combination of this extraordinary historical significance, the accessible public pricing, and the park district's maintained quality makes Downers Grove Golf Club among the meaningful public golf sites in the United States.