It should be no surprise to anyone who’s been out on the links during a pleasant afternoon in the sun or seen the dew on the grass on the morning that golf has been a favorite past time for many years. To that end, it should be no surprise to anyone that the game has a storied history that spans an impressive stretch of time and colorful people.

There has been much controversy over the history of golf with some pundits insisting the game was invented in Scotland and others sure it started on the frozen plains of the Netherlands. However it happened, the Scots are credited with being the first people to knock a ball over a prescribed course toward a hole. While golf is an old game, progress in it has been made slowly as well. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, golf balls were made of feathers sewn together and called ‘featheries.’ The origin of term golf links is interesting as well.

During the early years of the game, the Scots found the ideal playing conditions were by the sea on the stretches of sand called links. Clubs were originally made of one piece of wood and it wasn’t until much later that separate heads that could be attached were introduced. The first golf clubs can be traced back to Edinburgh in 1774 and consisted primarily of a loose association of people who loved to play the game and be around their fellows.

Although golf may have been played in an organized fashion in the United States as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the earliest specific record of the game was found in a New York newspaper published in April 1779. Other than those brief notices, very little is known about golf in North America before 1884. However, the popularity of golf grew in the US and by the turn of the century there were over 400 clubs. By 1925, the number of golf clubs had skyrocketed to 4,500.