Wykagyl Country Club

History

Wykagyl Country Club traces its lineage back to 1898, when a group of New Rochelle residents organized a golf club in the tradition sweeping through Westchester County at the close of the nineteenth century. The club took its name from the old Native American term for the region, a nod to the land’s history that predates the fairways laid upon it. Like many clubs of its era, Wykagyl began modestly before ambition — and membership rolls — demanded something grander.

That ambition brought A. W. Tillinghast to the property, and his involvement placed Wykagyl among the early proving grounds for an architect who would go on to shape some of the most storied courses in American golf. Tillinghast arrived at Wykagyl in the early years of his career, before Winged Foot, Baltusrol, and San Francisco Golf Club cemented his reputation as one of the game’s defining designers. At Wykagyl, he was given rolling Westchester terrain and the chance to apply the principles he’d absorbed from his studies of British links and his own emerging design philosophy — work that would inform decades of his later commissions.

Over the twentieth century, Wykagyl settled into its role as one of the New York metropolitan area’s enduring private clubs, hosting championship golf at various points and maintaining its standing among Westchester’s tightly knit circle of historic clubhouses. The club’s membership has preserved much of Tillinghast’s original routing through the generations, a continuity that ties the present-day course back to its 1898 founding and to the architect who helped define what it would become.