Chicago Golf Club
Designed by Seth Raynor
History
Chicago Golf Club traces its origins to 1892, when Charles Blair Macdonald laid out a rudimentary nine-hole course for a small circle of Chicago businessmen eager to bring the Scottish game to the American Midwest. The club’s founding predates almost every other golf institution in the country, and its charter members counted themselves among the five founding clubs of the United States Golf Association in 1894 — a distinction that places Chicago Golf Club at the very headwaters of organized American golf. Macdonald himself would later expand the layout to eighteen holes, making it the first full-length golf course built in the United States.
The course as it exists today, however, owes its architecture to Seth Raynor, who reworked the grounds in the early 1920s following Macdonald’s original template principles. Raynor, who had apprenticed under Macdonald and absorbed his mentor’s fascination with the great template holes of Scotland and England, brought a disciplined geometric hand to the flat Wheaton prairie — translating concepts like the Redan and the Biarritz into an American idiom on land that offered little natural drama of its own. His work here represents one of the purest expressions of the Macdonald-Raynor design philosophy, executed on a site the two men understood intimately from years of association.
Since Raynor’s revisions, Chicago Golf Club has been maintained with a conservative hand, resisting the wholesale modernization that reshaped many of its contemporaries through the mid-twentieth century. The club has hosted numerous USGA championships over the decades, including U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, and U.S. Senior Open competitions, cementing its place not merely as a historical curiosity but as a working championship venue. Its private membership has long treated the course as an artifact worth preserving rather than a canvas for reinvention, and much of what Raynor built remains recognizable on the ground today.
Playing Notes
Walking is the only way around, and your legs will feel every bit of it by the back nine — the ground here rolls and heaves in ways that flat prairie courses simply don't, so pack comfortable shoes and expect uneven lies more often than not. The greens run fast and firm, demanding that you think about where your approach shot leaves you rather than just where the pin sits, and short misses around the putting surfaces can get away from you quickly if you're not respecting the slopes. Bunkers here aren't decorative; they're deep and positioned to catch shots that drift even slightly off line, so club selection and honest assessment of your own tendencies matter more than raw distance off the tee. Wind moves through the open stretches and can shift your strategy hole to hole, particularly on approach shots where a few extra yards of carry make the difference between a manageable putt and a scramble for par. Come with your ground game sharp — bump-and-run shots and lag putting will save you more strokes here than a hot driver, and mental patience matters as much as ball-striking on a course that gives you few soft landing spots.