Early American Golf's Decline

American golf during the Regency was essentially expiring. The game had arrived in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century through Scottish merchants—a 1743 (some sources 1739) bill of lading records 96 clubs and 432 feathery balls shipped from Leith to the Charleston merchant David Deas—and three documented societies took root in the southern port cities and New York. The South Carolina Golf Club, founded in Charleston in 1786 and playing over Harleston Green between roughly Calhoun and Beaufain streets, was the first formal club in the western hemisphere; it ran annual press notices of meetings on Harleston's Green from 1788 to 1799, then nothing thereafter. The Savannah Golf Club, organized in 1794 and meeting at the Merchants and Planters Coffee House, is the only one with documented activity carrying into the Regency proper: its archives include a call to annual meeting from 1796 and an invitation dated 20 December 1811, after which the trail goes cold.

Conditions of play were rudimentary. Harleston Green was a rough rectangle also used for cattle shows and horseracing, with no tee boxes, flagsticks, or putting surfaces; the holes were hard to see, so "finders"—often enslaved boys, the earliest American caddies—stood by the cups and shouted warnings. There was no fixed number of holes, no purpose-built course, no clubmakers, no domestic ball trade; equipment was still imported from Leith or St Andrews. Membership was the small Scottish merchant diaspora and their professional associates—in Savannah's case, drawn from the same social pool that founded the Cotillion Club in 1817—and the institution looked far more like a dining society that happened to play golf than a sporting club in the modern sense.

Then the game simply stopped. After the War of 1812, golf's popularity in America declined for several decades; it did not resurface until isolated outposts appeared at Estes Park, Colorado in 1875, Burlington, Iowa in 1883, Oakhurst, West Virginia in 1884, and Foxburg, Pennsylvania in 1885. The reasons were partly economic—the disruption of Anglo-American trade and the collapse of the merchant networks that had imported both equipment and players—and partly demographic: golf had never moved beyond its narrow Scottish enclave to become a native American pastime the way cricket briefly did, or baseball would. The Regency was thus the last gasp of a first wave that effectively ended around 1811-1815 in Savannah and Charleston, leaving roughly a seventy-year gap before the second importation took hold.

The continuous American game traces only to that later revival: John Reid's apple-tree foursome and the founding of St Andrew's Golf Club in Yonkers in 1888, Shinnecock Hills, Newport, The Country Club at Brookline, and Chicago Golf Club following in the early 1890s, and the United States Golf Association forming in 1894. So while Scottish gentlemen in the 1810s were grumbling about stymie rulings, financial difficulties, and overcrowded links, their counterparts in Charleston and Savannah were quietly putting their clubs away for the better part of a century.