League of Connecticut Golf Clubs

1899: A time of plus fours, niblicks and a new league of golf clubs

To appreciate the founding of the Connecticut State Golf Association, one must have a sense of time and place.  This was horse-and-buggy, gas-lamp America before the Wright brothers' biplane or Henry Ford's Model T.  This was America when football, invented by Yale man and New Haven Country Club member Water Camp, was in its third decade and struggling for recognition outside a few elite colleges in the East.  More significantly, this was America when the ancient Scottish game of golf was a novelty unknown; perhaps foreign would be the better word, to all but a few.  It had been barely a decade since the members of Scotsman John Reid's "apple tree gang" hung their coats on a gnarled old tree and hit gutta percha balls over crude fairways in a Yonkers, NY pasture.  That playing ground, aptly named the St. Andrews Country Club in 1888, is thought to be the first organized golf club in America.

So it was with considerable foresight that twelve charter clubs were drawn together in 1899 to form the League of Connecticut Golf Clubs (later to become the CSGA), the nation's oldest state golf association.  The official founding most likely occurred in July of 1899 when the first state golf championship, the forerunner to the Connecticut Amateur, was held at Brooklawn Country Club.

If the CSGA was the inspiration of a single forward-thinking man, someone like Robert D. Pryde, for example, we have no way of knowing who that person was.  There is no doubt, though, that the association, which began over a century ago, left a rich legacy which the CSGA continues today.

Twelve Founding Members of the CSGA