Source: VT Golf Magazine | Issue: Summer 1997 | Author: Patrick White
Synopsis: This article is about how the Mt. Anthony Country Club of Bennington came to be the club we see today.
The sloping, hillside setting of Mt. Anthony Country Club is ironic, symbolic, and most of all appropriate. The land stretches between the small-town urban bustle of Bennington, Vermont, on the lower side, and the stately homes of Old Bennington on the upper side. Likewise, the history of the club serves as a bridge between these different worlds, and tells the story of a club and a town coming together.
The early years of the Club are traced by former-Bennington College professor John D. Forbes in his 1944 booklet. The Mount Anthony Country Club.
“One summer in the early 1890’s George Worthington of Cleveland, Ohio, and William White of New York, both ardent sportsmen, came up to Bennington and stayed at the Walloomsac Inn. One of them observed to the other that it was a pity that Bennington, in other respects an ideal place, had no facilities for playing the game of golf which had recently become so popular in sporting circles. They promptly resolved to remedy this lack and secured permission to lay out a few holes in Samuel Robinson’s pasture down by the railroad underpass below the monument. This home-made links was most primitive with tin cans for cups and other tin cans on sticks for hole markers.