The History of Golf in America, From Charleston to the USGA

Golf was played at Harleston Green in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1780s, and the South Carolina Golf Club was organising it from 1786. Charleston was one of the busiest ports on the Atlantic seaboard and traded heavily with Britain; Scottish merchants brought the game with them, as Scottish merchants did everywhere they settled.

Then it stopped. The club did not survive the early nineteenth century, the ground was built over, and golf disappeared from the United States for roughly a hundred years. Nothing links the Charleston players to the clubs that appear in the 1880s: not a club, not a course, not a rule book, not a person. The revival was an independent import, not a continuation.

That discontinuity is why almost every published list of the oldest golf courses in America begins in the 1880s. It is a defensible convention, because the question is usually about somewhere a person could play today, but it is a convention rather than a finding, and it silently removes the first hundred years of the subject.

The second beginning is compressed to an extraordinary degree. Between 1884 and 1893, a single decade, American golf acquired its first laid-out course, its first continuously played course, its first club, its first incorporated club with a purpose-built clubhouse, its first eighteen holes, and a national governing body.

Five of those seven founding clubs were established within three years of one another. A sport does not normally arrive that way. What made it possible was that golf was being imported by a small, well-connected and wealthy group along the north-eastern seaboard, who knew each other and were building the same institution in parallel, a pattern that also explains why the sport's American social character was fixed almost immediately, and why it has been associated with wealth ever since.

In 1894 five clubs formed the United States Golf Association: Saint Andrew's Golf Club, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, Chicago Golf Club, The Country Club, Newport Country Club. They standardised the rules, defined the amateur, and ran the first national championships the following year at Newport.

The consequence is still visible in every list of America's oldest courses. Those five names recur not only because they are old but because they were in the room. Clubs of comparable age that were not, Foxburg and Oakhurst among them, have spent more than a century arguing their claims from outside a record they were absent from. Being early mattered; being early and organised mattered more.