Founded in 1892, Chicago Golf Club is one of America’s most exclusive clubs and today it is still intensely private.
Overall rating
5.5
Founded in 1892, Chicago Golf Club is one of America’s most exclusive clubs and today it is still intensely private.
It’s possible that Chicago acquired its “Windy City” nickname thanks to the cooling summer lake breezes, which funnel their way through the city streets, and it’s also feasible that the great World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 was the catalyst for the formation of Chicago Golf Club. After all, the city needed a golf course for the visiting VIPs.
Founded in 1892, Chicago Golf Club was initially located at Belmont, Illinois. In 1894 it moved to its present location at Wheaton and it became the first 18-hole course in America, designed by the daddy of American golf course architecture, Charles Blair Macdonald.
Chicago Golf Club has a number of firsts to write home about. In 1897 it was the first club outside the Northeast to host the US Open and it was also the first club to employ bent grass greens. Chicago was also one of the five founder members of the American Golf Association, which was subsequently renamed the USGA. The other four charter members were: Newport Country Club, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, St. Andrew's Golf Club (Yonkers, N.Y.), and The Country Club.
George Bahto commented as follows in The Evangelist of Golf : “Macdonald’s original design was not dramatically altered for over 20 years with the exception of a few suggestions by famed British architect Harry Colt. With new and better courses popping up all the time, the architect of Sunningdale, at the club’s request, tweaked the design to help keep the quality of the course competitive with some of the more modern layouts. Ultimately though, Chicago Golf Club’s design became antiquated and the club voted in 1922 to retain Macdonald’s legendary protégé, , to assist Macdonald in completely remodeling the layout.”
The club staged many early championships, including the US Amateur, US Open and the Walker Cup. In 1928, Bobby Jones was the Walker Cup playing captain and he posted an amazing course record 66, which drove team USA to an emphatic 11-1 victory. The Walker Cup returned to Chicago for the second time in 2005.
Chicago Golf Club is one of America’s most exclusive golf clubs and today it is still intensely private, but if you’ve been lucky enough to play this famous course, we’d love to read your review.
The latest ranking of the Top 100 Golf Courses in the World serves as the ultimate global golf bucket list. Most members of our World Top 100 Panel are seasoned golfers, each playing 20-30 of these courses annually while travelling extensively over decades to form their opinions on others. We recognise that opinions vary—even among our panel members. Rankings are subjective, and there are undoubtedly 50 or more courses in the UK and USA alone that could easily fit onto this list. Links Golf Pilgrimages The rankings
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