This is the prequel to PGA week. Before Donald Ross drew the course in his Pinehurst office, before construction broke ground in 1927, Aronimink Golf Club spent thirty-two years and four properties looking for a permanent home.
The video walks through the four-property history of the club. From a meadow at 52nd and Chester Avenue in southwest Philadelphia in 1896, where Belmont Cricket Club members started the Belmont Golf Association, to a second site at 54th and Whitby, to Drexel Hill, where A.W. Tillinghast laid out their first 18-hole course, to Newtown Square in 1928, where the proceeds of selling that Tillinghast layout funded the only golf course Donald Ross ever called his masterpiece.
Plus the buried details. The 18-year-old Belmont club champion named Hugh Wilson, who would later co-design Merion’s East Course with William Flynn. The 19-year-old caddie at the Whitby site named Johnny McDermott, who became the first American-born U.S. Open champion. John Shippen, hired by Belmont at age 19 in 1898, almost certainly the first golf professional born in the United States. The clubhouse architect at Newtown Square, Charles Barton Keen, who had built the Reynolds family’s Reynolda estate in North Carolina.
Chapters
- 0:00 — The Belmont meadow, 1896
- 1:50 — Sold a Tillinghast to buy a Ross
- 2:49 — Hugh Wilson and John Shippen
- 3:41 — Whitby Avenue and Johnny McDermott
- 4:18 — Drexel Hill and A. W. Tillinghast
- 7:15 — The 1926 sale to Newtown Square
- 8:39 — Augusta and the borrowed land
Sources
- Aronimink Golf Club official history
- PGA of America — A Closer Look at Aronimink
- The Tillinghast Association — Course Listings (Aronimink NLE)
- Donald Ross Society