Source: VT Golf Magazine | Issue: Summer 1999
Synopsis: This article is about the Country Club of Vermont and how it came to be the club we see today. It specifically delves into the development and creation of the club and the architect who created it, Graham Cooke.
It was the fall of 1996 and Canadian golf course architect Graham Cooke was combing the hills of central Vermont with a prospective client. ‘We’d looked at many sites for the group and we hadn’t really found a property that we felt had the expression they were looking for,” recalls Cooke. “They wanted a really high-end product,” he continued. “And when I first saw that property in Waterbury all doubts were erased very quickly because that was what we were looking for. I could hardly wait to sit down with my team and get working on route plans.”
What Cooke had found was the site for the new Country Club of Vermont- a stunning piece of land in the shadow of the Worcester Range with perpetual panoramas of Camel’s Hump and Mount Mansfield. “The site was large enough that we could use the beauty of the wetlands and their uniqueness. It also had a good balance of open land and treed land, and the treed land wa smature wood lots with large pine trees and maple trees, so it was ideal in that sense. Then there were the rolling hills- you just don’t get many sites that have that much movement and provide those long panoramic views of the hillsides- those sites are few and far between.”
Cooke made the most of what was given to him, and designed what he considers one of his best golf courses- a terrific walking course for serious players, and that shouldn’t be a surprise- the architect has long been a serious player in his own right.