The Game in America.

Americans began playing golf after the American Revolution, with two of the earliest clubs established in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1786, and Savannah, Georgia, in 1795. Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, Americans showed little interest in golf, and not until the 1880s did significant numbers of Americans start playing the game again. In 1887 Joseph M. Fox, a member of the Merion Cricket Club in Philadelphia, and John Reid, a Scottish immigrant and executive of an ironwork in Yonkers, New York, organized the nation's first modern golf club, named St. Andrews after the historic club in Scotland. In 1891 William K. Vanderbilt hired Willie Dunn, a noted Scottish golfer, to build Shinnecock Hills, the first professionally designed course, near Southampton, Long Island, where New York's wealthy elite had summer homes. The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club became the model for clubs throughout the...