The Early Hillsdale Golf & Country Club

Before the country club was established certain local gentlemen “played golf” at the Fairgrounds. The 1901 Hillsdale Democrat reported that Dr. Walter Sawyer, son-in-law of Charles T. Mitchell, fell and broke his leg going through a fence at the south end of the race track while doing so.

George K. March, local insurance salesman, was one of the founding members who began planning in 1910 to establish a country club and golf course. It was finally organized in 1913.

In the early “history” of the country club, George K. March reported that Andrew Weisel, Jr. built the original clubhouse and the club later purchased the bowling alley from Baw Beese Park across the lake, which was closing. It was brought over in sections on the ice during the winter. A long-running joke was that the early club didn’t have sufficient funds to pay for adequate mowing equipment. Poet Edgar Guest visited one day from Detroit and insisted on playing the course, after which he joked that he’d lost his ball in the grass on one of the greens.

Carol A. Lackey