Source: VT Golf Magazine | Issue: Summer 1994
Synopsis: This article is about Crown Point Country Club and how it’s history has shaped it into a special club we see today.
How can you call a course that has staged the 1923 New England Men’s Amateur and the 1992 New England Women’s Amateur “hidden”? If the best amateur golfers in New England have played for the region’s highest honor, surely the golfing public must be aware of the facility. Yet if you ask players at nearby Woodstock or Quechee where Crown Point is, many will send you packing for New York State.
Instead of the sojourn, exit Interstate 91 at Ascutney, head two miles west, five miles south, and tee it up at Crown Point Country Club, one of Vermont’s hidden gems. You won’t be disappointed with this natural layout surrounded by miles of woods and farmland, totally untouched by the noise and confusion of even Vermont’s version of urban life.
The club was named for Crown Point Military Road, and a serious slicer can take a stroll through history just to the right of the tenth fairway. In 1760, Lord Jeffrey Amherst hacked a path through the wilderness from Fort #4 in Charlestown, New Hampshire, to Fort Ticonderoga in New York. Amherst was the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in American and his mission was to remove the French forts along Lake Champlain. The mid-summer road-building march through Vermont’s wilderness was merely a warm-up exercise for his 800 men. When he and other British commanders were successful against the French, and Vermont was finally considered hospitable land, the road they built showed English colonists “the fertility and value of the lands lying between Connecticut River and Lake Champlain,” according to Thompson’s 1842 Civil History of Vermont.