Club History
Ekwanok is established in 1899, as organized golf is just getting its start in America. A group of summer residents, led by James L. Taylor of Brooklyn and Clarence M. Clark of Philadelphia, join forces to form a private golf club in Manchester Village, and Taylor purchases a 200-acre parcel of farmland across from his River Road home that he thought would make an ideal site for an 18-hole golf course. He donates the land to the Club.
The group seeks out Walter J. Travis, the great Australian-born American golfer (three-time winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship and first American to win the British Amateur Championship) and John Duncan Dunn (a well-known golf course designer and scion of the famous Scottish golfing family) to design and oversee the building of a new course.
Walter J. Travis & John Duncan Dunn
Edward S. Isham, the club's first president, although not a golfer himself, is a well-respected and active member of the Manchester community and the head of a prominent Chicago law firm. Isham questions the originally-chosen name for the Club, The Equinox Country Club, due to the proliferation of the name Equinox in Manchester. He suggests instead a (unsubstantiated) Native American word for equinox, and the Club is named the Ekwanok Country Club.
On September 7, 1899, the group formally signs the incorporation documents, and Ekwanok is founded.
Construction of the new course starts immediately and is finished by the summer of 1900, including a beautiful, three story clubhouse, complete with a pro-shop, locker rooms for men and women, a kitchen, lounges and a ballroom. It is located behind what is today's 16th green.
An 18-hole golf course is somewhat unusual at this time, as most clubs in existence have nine holes, with a few layouts of just six holes. As a result, Ekwanok, with its 18-hole championship course in the beautiful valley below Mount Equinox, becomes an immediate success and a center for American amateur golf. Various tournaments are established, including the President's Cup, later called the Isham Cup (which today presents one of the oldest golfing trophies in America). The tournaments attract many of the outstanding golfers in the nation, including Charles B. MacDonald, Walter Travis, Jerry Travers, and Fred Herreshoff.
The Vermont Golf Association is organized at Ekwanok, and the first state amateur championship is held at the Club in July 1902. Ekwanok members win the first eight state championships.
Ekwanok hosts the final match of the first international championship involving leading players from England and Scotland.
Ekwanok elects Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of President Lincoln, as the third president of the Club, and he serves honorably as president until his death in 1926. Lincoln first visits Manchester with his mother, Mary Todd, and brother Tad, in 1864, during the Civil War, while Lincoln is a student at Harvard. He and his mother are scheduled to return again in 1865, but that is cancelled due to the death of his father. But Lincoln's Chicago law-firm partner, Edward S. Isham, has a summer residence in Manchester, Ormsby Hill, and Lincoln returns many times to visit Isham. Then, following Isham's unexpected death in 1902, Lincoln purchases 500 acres of Isham's estate to build his own summer residence in Manchester, which he calls: Hildene. In 1928 the Robert Todd Lincoln Memorial Cup, an invitational tournament, is inaugurated. That tournament continues today as a member/guest event and is one of the highlights of the golf season.
Robert Todd Lincoln
Horace Rawlins, the winner of the inaugural U.S. Open in 1895 in Newport, RI, becomes the Club's golf professional and serves the Club for the next seven years.
Horace Rawlins
Ekwanok hosts the U.S. Amateur Championship (then called the "National Amateur Championship"), involving 105 of the nation's finest golfers. Two of the favorites in the field, Jerome Travers (the 1913 National Amateur Champion) and America's first golf hero, Francis Ouimet, (the 1913 U.S. Open Champion), face each other in the final round in a 36-hole match. Ouimet bests Travers, 6 and 5 on the second playing of the 13th hole. Years later, Ouimet tells Joe Looney of the Boston Herald: "Winning the Open was one thing—the winning of the Amateur was the fulfillment of an ambition. The Open was a windfall. The Amateur was within reach, or so I thought." Seventeen years later—to the day—Ouimet wins the 1931 U.S. Amateur Championship—by the same score, 6 and 5.
21-year-old Francis Ouimet, U.S. Amateur Champion, at Ekwanok, September 5, 1914
Bobby Jones (a/k/a Robert Tyre Jones Jr.) first comes to Ekwanok in July 1918, playing golf to raise money for the American Red Cross. During World War I, Jones toured the country with other prominent golfers of the day, playing exhibition matches to raise money. Here he is seen hitting his tee shot on Ekwanok's first hole, and on August 3, 1918, Jones sets the-then course record of 71. Jones returns to Ekwanok in 1937 for another exhibition match.
Designed to be a walking course, Ekwanok needs caddies for its members and guests. But as Club membership increases in the early days, caddies are sometimes in short supply in fairly remote areas such as Manchester. To meet the need, a dentist from Cambridge, MA, establishes the Manchester Caddie Camp in 1922, a group of Boy Scouts, largely from the "big cities," who enjoy a summer camp-like experience, learn the game of golf and serve as caddies at the Club. The camp flourishes, grows to a group of ~100 caddies, and lasts for 20 years. Today, Ekwanok is the last remaining course in Vermont with a caddie program.
Members of the Manchester Caddie Camp
Lincoln presided over Ekwanok during prosperous times. But shortly after his death, the nation falls into the Great Depression, and Ekwanok is not immune to the hardships. Fortunately, however, Bartlett Arkell, a philanthropist, art connoisseur, and president of the Beechnut Packing Co. for 50 years, who joined the Club in 1919, helps steer Ekwanok through the 1930's. The generosity of Arkell and his wife is legendary at Ekwanok, in Manchester and at his other favored club, Augusta National, where he provides the purse for the first nine years of the Masters Invitational and helps to fund the moving, enlargement and conversion of the famous manor house into that club's first clubhouse.
Louise and Bartlett Arkell
One of the Arkells' many contributions to Ekwanok is the 1936 complete refurbishment of the then-36-year-old Clubhouse. However, in October 1938, a late-night fire destroys the entire renovated Clubhouse. Fortunately, though, the summer golf season has ended, so most of the Club's artwork, books and silver trophies, are offsite in winter storage and are saved from destruction.
Once again, though, the Arkells come to the aid of Ekwanok by overseeing the funding and construction of a new Clubhouse, which is ready for occupancy in time for the 25th anniversary celebration, in the summer of 1939, of the 1914 U.S. Amateur Championship held at the Club.
Ekwanok's 25th anniversary celebration of the 1914 U.S. Amateur Championship gains national attention when Lowell Thomas, preeminent radio commentator, author, explorer and journalist of the day, broadcasts his daily radio show from the Club's men's locker room on July 3, 1939.
Ekwanok member Charlotte "Chotty" [Chaffee] Fletcher (1917-1982) wins the first of her three Vermont State Women's Golf Championships. She is also State Champion in 1959 and 1961 and finishes second in 1958 and 1960. Chotty also won many Ekwanok club golf championships. She was an accomplished skier as well, and her niece is the former Olympic alpine ski racer, Suzy "Chapstick" Chaffee, who became the pre-eminent freestyle ballet skier of the early 1970s. The Club honors Chotty today by naming the Club's Women's 18-hole, Individual-Stroke-Play, Championship after her.
The United States Seniors Golf Association chooses Ekwanok as the site for its first "Invitational" golf tournament, bringing together golfers from all over America, as well as Canada. The USSGA was organized in 1905 and is the world's first association of "senior" (age 55 and over) golfers to include in its membership amateur golfers by invitation from golf clubs throughout the United States. The Ekwanok USSGA tournament continues to this day. In 1964, Francis Ouimet, then an honorary member of Ekwanok, returns to play in the USSGA's Invitational tournament 50 years after winning the 1914 U.S. Amateur. Championship at the Club. Said Ouimet: "Of all the places I have visited in this country perhaps the one I enjoyed the most is Ekwanok... Not only is the golf course one of the most pleasant, but the surroundings are so peaceful that they add much to the beauty of the place."
Luigi Lucioni, an Italian-American painter known for his portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, especially his bucolic and romanticized Vermont landscapes, and a Manchester summer resident from 1939 to 1988, found many subjects at Ekwanok to paint. Indeed...
...his many paintings of birch trees throughout the course, several of which hang in the Clubhouse, inspires Ekwanok in 1970 to adopt a new logo, and Lucioni provides the original drawing for the new design.
After more than 20 years of advocacy, Board member (and former President) Syd Stokes,along with fellow Board member Bing Hunter (who equally share the cost) see the Founders' Room addition to the Clubhouse come into being. The Founders' Room provides a quiet respite from the day's activities, surrounded by display cases of the Club's trophies, history and library.
Ekwanok celebrates its first 100 years of existence with a variety of special activities from May through October.
A few members of the Centennial Planning Committee: (L to R) Bill and Patty Hancock, Joe and Molly Anderson, Lance and Patsy Odden.
In the winter of 2013-2014 the Club renovates the Dining Room and adds a Tap Room, called the Ouimet Room.
Ekwanok further renovates the Clubhouse in the winter of 2016-2017 with the addition of the Travis Room for expanded casual dining and bar service, a new men's locker room, the expansion and renovation of the golf pro shop, and the restoration of the 1939 murals in the Arkell Lounge.
