Golf had been played in North America long before—likely even dur-ing the colonial period, with dilettantes occasionally hitting balls in open fields or parks. It enjoyed a brief period of popularity in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, in the late eighteenth century. The first golf clubs and balls arrived in America from Scotland in a 1743 shipment to Charleston, where a small group of residents later established the South Carolina Golf Club in 1786, the first documented club outside the United Kingdom. The group met at the city’s Harleston Green, a public park. Similarly, locals in Savannah played in a city park and established the Savannah Golf Club in 1796. These pursuits were apparently short lived; there is no reference to the Charleston club after 1799, and the game also seemed to vanish from Savannah by the early nineteenth century. Growing tension with England, culminating in the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812, may have curtailed golf ’s development in antebellum America, for there is little further evidence of it in the United States until the 1880s.4 Because these early golfing pursuits consisted of small groups who used shared park space, they left little in the historical record and few permanent marks on the landscape. There is, however, a 1795 refer-ence to a “Club House” at Harleston Green—likely the first golf-related oriGinS oF GolF in The UniTeD STaTeS ( 3structure in American history and one that would predate permanent, dedicated golf “links” (or courses) by some ninety years.