SPRINGFIELD, NEW JERSEY | In the pantheon of American golf, few places loom as large as Baltusrol.
Founded in 1895 by Louis Keller, the publisher of the celebrated guide to members of the aristocracy known as the Social Register, the association took form on rolling land in this town some 20 miles west of New York City. The nearly 600-acre property had once been owned by a farmer named Baltus Roll, who had been murdered in 1831 in what some people in Manhattan called “the crime of the century.” But the notoriety of what ended up being an unsolved case did not dissuade Keller from combining the first and last names of the long-departed victim to create the appellation for his new retreat, calling it the Baltusrol Golf Club.
Keller was an ambitious soul who wanted Baltusrol to be the leading golf club for what he felt was the country’s leading metropolis in New York City. One way to achieve that, he believed, was to host major golf championships. And Baltusrol staged five of them in its first 20 years on a layout that had been fashioned by the club’s head golf professional and superintendent, Scotsman George Low, among them two U.S. Opens, a pair of U.S. Women’s Amateurs and one U.S. Amateur.
Keller liked the cachet those competitions brought but wanted to elevate the club’s profile and stature even further. So, he hired A.W. Tillinghast to add a second 18-hole track. But after considering the ground on which he had to work, the architect suggested that Keller plow under the original layout and let him design and construct two new 18-hole tracks. Tillinghast’s goal was to make them different but architecturally equal. Dubbed the “dual course” concept, it was a first for American golf.
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