Source: VT Golf Magazine | Issue: Summer 1999 | Author: Gordon Harding
Synopsis: This article is about the history and formation of the Montague Golf Club in Randolph, Vermont.
“Golf links have been laid out at Montague Place, and this game will soon become the rage.” That simple sentence from the pages of the June 29, 1897, edition of the Herald and News, a weekly paper published in Randolph, Vermont, marked the beginning of what has been more than a century of golf being played on the same turf.
The name ‘Montague’ and the game of golf remain linked today under the banner of the Montague Golf Club of Randolph, a club formally organized in 1913 and now entering its 86th continuous season of play. As a club, it is the eighth-oldest in the state- but its venue, which began as the Montague Place links, is the second-oldest golfing grounds in Vermont. Only the private Dorset Field Club can claim greater longevity.
None of this history, however, was in the minds of the Montague members who, on a Saturday morning last June, stood on the high bluff that is the blue tee for the first hold and watched the roiling, boiling waters of the Third Branch completely destroy the fairways of the first and adjacent ninth holes.