Country Clubs: Country Clubs, like tennis and golf, became part of American life during the last quarter of the 19^th century. Having evolved from city clubs with the influence of resort hotels, hunt clubs, and spas, such institutions, first found in the Northeast, offered their members private social, dining, and outdoor recreational facilities. The latter and the suburban or rural locations suggested by the name differentiated the country club from downtown or city clubs.

Without golf, country clubs would have remained a small, urban, late 19^th Century movement. Golf, which exploded in popularity during the 1890s after its 1888 American reintroduction, provided an extraordinary impetus for the spread coast to coast of country clubs, initially organized around polo and tennis. During the period before municipal and for profit golfing facilities became common, club membership or caddying provided almost the only access to the sport. Although golf appeared more slowly in the South than the northeast and Midwest, the original Asheville Country Club golf course may have existed as early as 1893, which would make it the state’s first green. The club built a new layout in 1909, 1924 (now the Grove Park Inn course), and again in 1928. Such a peripatetic histories prove common among early country clubs as courses for the evolving sport demanded rapidly expanding, and thus more rural and less expensive, acreage. Directors of Wilmington’s Cape Fear Country Club, organized on March 21, 1896, included the influential political figure George Rountree. Although the current golf course there dates to 1924, the club offered seven holes by 1897 and maintained a nine hole track in 1910, when dues were $14 a year, and new members paid a $15 initiation fee. The original course incorporated Confederate earthworks in the routing. Early members adopted red riding coats as their official attire. A course existed at the Linville Golf Club before the turn of the century, although the current 18 date only to 1924.

The cost of acquiring capital for land and facilities often made even early country clubs a long term process. Newly formed clubs issued bonds to their members in order raise capital to purchase land and build facilities. Although an extant account book demonstrates that the Chapel Hill C.C. existed in 1907 and had purchased golf equipment before 1919, their nine hole course southeast of campus apparently did not open until 1923. Dates for the opening of facilities are far easier to obtain than for the actual founding of the clubs as legal entities. Early North Carolina country club golf courses included Raleigh’s Carolina Country Club (1912), Greensboro C.C. (1911), and Forsyth C.C. (1911) in Winston-Salem. As clubs could afford it, they upgraded their club houses. Cape Fear replaced their original converted railroad building with a nonetheless modest French Colonial edifice with a view of the river, the city, and Smith’s Creek. Carolina Country Club in Raleigh displayed a typical pattern, replacing the original rustic structure around 1950 with a long, low Modernist building, only later to put a more larger, more traditional clubhouse in its place.

In Pinehurst, the Tufts family from Massachusetts developed full service winter resort facilities, including golf after 1897. It eventually combined a membership country club (currently based on where one lives within the Village of Pinehurst) with a commercial resort. Guest of the resort could, thus, afford themselves of clubs facilities, which rapidly came to include four golf courses designed by Donald Ross, the profound and prolific Scots immigrant to Pinehurst.

Numerous North Carolina country clubs have hosted professional tournaments since the 1903 North & South Open at Pinehurst. The first southern course to host the PGA Championship in 1936 and the Ryder Cup matches in 1951, Ross’ Pinehurst Number Two, perennially ranked among the world’s twenty finest layouts, became in 1999 only the second course in the Southeast to host the U.S. Open championship. By that time Pinehurst Resort & Country Club included eight courses with more planned. Byron Nelson won one of his still-record eleven consecutive PGA Tour victories at Durham’s Hope Valley Country Club in 1945. Women professionals arrived in the state with the 1947 Women’s US Open at Greensboro’s Starmount Forest. Raleigh Country Club provided a regular LPGA stop throughout the women’s tour’s first three decades.

Country clubs sprang up rapidly during the 1920s as the middle class desired a way to pool resources to enjoy communally the affluent lifestyle. Charlotte built three country club courses and Asheville and Greensboro two each during the decade, while Rocky Mount (1922) and Salisbury (1927) each welcomed one. When Hope Valley C.C. opened in Durham in 1926, George Watts Hills donated the nine-hole Durham C.C to the city for a municipal course now called Hillandale Golf Club. Even less urban places gained them: Morganton (1928), Mount Airy (1928), Roanoke Rapids (1923), and Blowing Rock (1922). Barely in North Carolina, Alleghany County’s Roaring Gap Club (1926) features a secluded Ross course 3700 feet above sea level along the edge of the Blue Ridge. Winston-Salem’s Reynolds family, also responsible for Forsyth CC and Old Town, built it as a summer getaway. The club seems little changed from the era of its construction. In 1923 James H. Brodie built a genuinely private golf course for himself near Henderson when advised by his physician to take up the sport. Approached by those desiring to form a club, Brodie sold them his 87 acres, which became West End C.C.

Roughly one country club in seven went under between 1929 and 1939. Countless new and expansion club house and golf course projects were cancelled. Even the survivors experienced hard times, resorting to membership discounts, benefit dances, and other money makers. Although the Great Depression witnessed little course construction outside WPA projects, in 1935 eight partners commenced a Fayetteville country club, which had 113 members in but two years. Kieckhofer Container Company built for its 1200 employees a country club near Plymouth. The club opened in 1937 with watered grass greens, then an extravagance and novelty, on its nine holes, as well as club house and swimming pool. By the 1950s, as polio threat subsided and desegregation came to public facilities, pools became as much a staple of the clubs as golf and tennis facilities.

Eventually, country clubs sorted into three broad types: fully private clubs open only to members and their guests; semi-private clubs which permitted some use of the golf or swimming facilities by non-members for a daily fee; and those like Pinehurst or Linville which afforded privileges to guests of specific resort properties in addition to their members. The first two types prove more often member-owned, while the latter kind are private businesses offering membership privileges. During the period when liquor by the drink was illegal in North Carolina, many country clubs offered a facsimile, bartenders mixing drinks using bottles supplied individually by members.

Country clubs have served as a means of establishing status and separating its members from the larger community. Whereas Jews had joined the city clubs, the country clubs generally excluded them. Racist, class, and nativist impulses have undeniably attracted some to private clubs populated by "people like us." Race-based barriers remained common among country clubs throughout the United States until 1990, when the Shoal Creek (Alabama) affair generated sufficient public pressure to force the governing bodies of both professional and amateur golf to denounce such practices.

In 1960 Charlie Sifford, born in a racially mixed Charlotte neighborhood in 1922, broke the color barrier on the PGA tour, after the courts overturned the organization’s "Caucasian only" clause. Then, he wrote in his 1992 autobiography Just Let Me Play, "the country clubs themselves would remind me in as crude a manner as possible that I didn’t belong." By age 10 Sifford caddied at Charlotte’s Carolina Country Club, whose all-white "membership consisted of local businessmen who had done well for themselves." In the caddy yards and on Mondays when permitted on the course, Sifford mastered the game. He reported that by age 17 he was warned that he had become "too good" at golf and relocated to Philadelphia due to the threats.

Until the 1990s, most African-American golfers in North Carolina were relegated to certain public and municipal courses save for caddy tournaments and one unique exception. Opened for golf during the crest of the civil rights movement in 1965, Garner’s semi-private Meadowbrook C. C. became the first country club for blacks south of Maryland. Businessmen M. Grant Batey, James J. Samson, Jr., and Paul Jervay founded Meadowbrook in 1958 by purchasing 140 acres of tobacco land. For many years a fully private club with 150 members, Meadowbrook has become semi-private due to financial pressures. A 1998 monograph asserted that the club included one of but four African-American owned golf courses then operating in the United States. African-Americans in Greensboro organized, also during the late 1950s, Forest Lake Country Club. It apparently neither offered golf nor survived to the end of the century.

The boom years between the end of World War II and 1970 brought even further expansion of country clubs in the Tar Heel State than during the 1920s. Housing developments, a growing middle class, and the needs of elites to distance themselves further all fueled growth. Golf fit perfectly with the country club purposes of networking, demonstrating status, social activities, athletics, and modest wagering. Twenty new country clubs appeared between 1945 and 1952 alone. Cities added second private clubs, for example Raleigh Country Club (1948), Wilmington’s Pine Valley (1956), and Willowhaven (1957) near Durham. Smaller communities established their first country clubs, such as Reidsville (1945), Burlington (1946), Washington (1949), Siler City (1954), Wilkesboro (1958), and Robersonville (1965).

By 1946 the Greensboro C.C. charged a $200 application fee and $120 per year dues for its 477 members. Golfers paid greens fees of $2 week days and a buck more weekends with a caddy costing $1.25 plus tip. Club rules excluded women from commencing play between the hours of noon and three on Saturday and Sunday. In 1963, the original forty members of the Country Club of North Carolina in Southern Pines contained an assortment of the state’s elites. Those paying $2000 to join and $25 a month dues included businessmen J. Gregory Poole and Karl Hudson, Jr., democratic politicians Richardson Preyer, Voit Gilmore, and Kenneth Royall, as well as Hargrove "Skipper" Bowles, who was both.

Country clubs provided a barometer for suburban spread – and the ability of means of transportation to support it -- throughout the Twentieth Century. Only once the automobile reached the country club class, freeing them from rail, could the facilities spread to most of North Carolina. First generation country clubs tended to mark the edge of town. In bigger places they stood at the end of the trolley line, as did Raleigh’s Carolina C.C., while in smaller towns "Country Club Road" can still be found just outside the city limits. By the 1950s, cities had grown around the oldest club properties, while secondary and tertiary country clubs opened on the new outskirts. As the century came to a close, country clubs had become an exurban phenomenon, often ten miles or more from the nearest municipality, if not in a genuinely remote location.

During the last third of the 20^th century, both golf courses and country clubs became linked to real estate developments. Some communities, frequently gated, such as Carolina Trace (1968), south of Sanford, Bald Head Island (1975), Treyburn (1988) north of Durham and Governors Club (1989) south of Chapel Hill, used exclusive country clubs with marquee golf course architects (Robert Trent Jones, George Cobb, Tom Fazio, and Jack Nicklaus, respectively) to attract residents to high end developments. Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming alluded to life at such a resort club in the mountains of North Carolina. Nonetheless, by the end of the 20^th Century, country clubs accounted for less than 10% of new golf course construction. Most golf course developments extended vague promises of one day becoming private country clubs.

Country clubs lost prestige after 1960, both communities and businesses, they stood awkwardly as private stewards of public space with exclusive membership practices. Elitism and discriminatory practices caused many to take a dim view of country clubs. Citizens of Boone rejected the idea of a country club as inappropriate for their community in 1957. The Carolinas Golf Association reported in 1999 that while the number of courses had increased twenty percent during the decade past, the number of country club courses had decreased thirteen percent. Economic and social changes, along with the development of high end daily fee courses which promised better courses than the private clubs, took their toll on country clubs. Some changed to semi-private status or accepted more outside play through tournaments and privilege cards. Others turned to real estate tie-ins and aggressive membership campaigns.

While these factors greatly increased access by non-whites, they also signaled problems for the country club as an institution at the end of the 1990s. Graham’s Quarry Hills Country Club, a private club owned by Will Mann, then president of the PGA of America, advertised in newspapers both for outside play and for members, touting special rates. By 2000 it became officially semi-private. Thirty seven years after opening in 1962, Wildcat Cliffs Country Club between Highlands and Cashiers, used a web site established by a realty company to spread the following message at least suggesting ample availability of membership bonds:

Membership in Wildcat is a non-profit, full equity membership which is limited to 250 members…. There are presently 121 homes on or adjacent to the golf course and several building lots are available. Membership does not require property ownership. The Wildcat Cliffs Country Club Information Center is located at Blair Realty, at the entrance to the Club.

As new country clubs became arms of real estate ventures, the private courses continued to decrease in relative significance as venues for golf. Meanwhile, private clubs similarly lost their near monopolies in North Carolina towns on fine dining, tennis, and swimming. In 1938, the state boasted 84 golf courses with sixty, or 71 percent, owned by country clubs. Sixty years later, North Carolina contained 573 golf courses according to a state sponsored survey. At the same time, the online database of Golf Web listed 151 country clubs featuring 175 golf courses, or merely thirty percent, in the state. Mecklenburg County had the most private and semi-private country clubs, fourteen, followed by Wake with eight and Guilford with seven.

For more information:

Diane Cashman, A History of the Cape Fear Country Club (1984)

O.B. Keeler, Golf in North Carolina (1938)

James M. Mayo, The American Country Club: Its Origin and Development (1998)

Pete McDaniel, Uneven Lies: The Heroic Story of African-Americans in Golf (2000)

Calvin H. Sinnette, Forbidden Fairways: African-Americans and the Game of Golf (1998)

Charles Reagan Wilson, "Golf" in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (1989)