Source: VT Golf Magazine | Issue: Summer 1992 | Author: David Robinson
Synopsis: This article takes the reader through a century of golf in Vermont, explaining the history and evolution of the sport going from a small pastime to a dominant sport.
From homemade clubs and tomato cans to graphite shafts and videotaped swing analysis, golf has come a long way during its first century in North America.
While Scottish immigrants had played around Montreal earlier in the century, the sport was introduced in the United States by Robert Lockhart, a New York linen merchant who frequently returned on business to his home soil of Dumfernline, Scotland. On one trip, Lockhart brought back six clubs and 20 gutta-percha balls which he soon shared with John Reid, a Dumfernline boyhood friend who lived in Yonkers-on-Hudson.
The sport caught on instantly. From three holes in a pasture, Reid and his neighbors were soon playing every Sunday on a 30-acre meadow on Palisade Avenue, where they had laid out six holes.