There's a golf course nine miles north of Cooperstown that has been there since 1894. If you've driven the lake road, you've probably passed it. If you've looked out from a boat on Otsego Lake on a clear day, you may have glimpsed it on the hillside above the water. Otsego Golf Club is not loud about itself. It doesn't need to be. It is the 80th oldest golf course in the United States — and its origin story involves two gentleman farmers, a steamboat pier, and a founding member who booked passage on the wrong ship.

Before There Were a Dozen Golfers in America

Photo: Otsego Golf Club Facebook Page

Before the late 1880s, golf was barely a sport in America. As Herbert Warren Wind — the man who coined the term "Amen Corner" — wrote in his landmark history, The Story of American Golf, fewer than a dozen people in the entire country played the game. One of the most devoted of that small circle was Leslie Pell-Clarke.

Pell-Clarke owned Swanswick, a large estate in Springfield, New York that included farmland on what is now the site of Glimmerglass Festival. He was, by any measure, a golf obsessive. He wintered in Orlando and summered on Otsego Lake, and in 1892 he built a nine-hole course on his Orlando property — one of the earliest private golf courses in the American South. That course is long gone. This one isn't.

By the spring of 1894, Pell-Clarke had recruited his old St. Paul's School classmate Henry L. Wardwell — a successful New York stockbroker whose primary passions ran more toward gardening, horses, cattle, and prize-winning sheep on his Pinehurst estate in Springfield — to go in on a golf course together. Wardwell wasn't especially interested in golf, but he was a good neighbor. The Otsego Golf Club officially opened with 12 holes laid across the Pell-Clarke and Wardwell properties at the north end of the lake.

It wasn't just the two of them. The founding roster, documented in an 1898 club booklet, included George Hyde Clarke of Springfield, A. Beekman Cox of Cherry Valley, and Henry C. Bowers, John H. Bowers, and William Constable, all of Cooperstown. But it was Pell-Clarke's gregarious energy that gave the new club its early momentum. In those first years, he drew friends and associates to the Springfield area — including another old school connection named Arthur Ryerson, whose family would become central to the club's story.

Arriving by Steamboat

In the club's early decades, many Cooperstown golfers didn't drive to the course. They took a steamboat.

Otsego Lake was a working waterway in those years, with steamboats running regular routes up and down its length. Golfers would disembark at a 300-foot pier located near what is now the first tee, then make their way up to the course. Others came overland by horse-drawn carriage from Cooperstown or over the hills from Cherry Valley. When steamboat service on the lake ended in 1931, the old dock was relocated east along the lakefront to a spot directly in front of the clubhouse porch, just beyond the 9th green.

A Titanic Connection

Pell-Clarke died in 1904. The role he had played — enthusiastic patron, social connector, the person who made the thing go — passed to Arthur Ryerson.

In 1912, Ryerson was traveling in Europe with his family when word came that his eldest son had been killed in an automobile accident in Princeton. He needed to get home immediately. He booked his family on the fastest available ship.

"Arthur Ryerson died in the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 — 114 years ago today."

RMS Titanic departing Southampton, April 10, 1912 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

His 12-year-old son, John B. Ryerson, almost didn't make it off the ship either. Under the lifeboat protocols of that night, women and children boarded first — and in 1912, a boy of 12 was classified as an adult male. By the rules, he stayed behind. He was allowed onto a lifeboat anyway. He survived.

Arthur Ryerson — Encyclopedia Titanica

John B. Ryerson, survivor — Encyclopedia Titanica

John B. Ryerson went on to own and operate Otsego Golf Club for more than five decades. He played golf with Bobby Jones, competed as an amateur at over 1,000 courses worldwide, and earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most golf courses played as an amateur.

Above the mantle in the clubhouse hangs a signed photograph — a gift from the man brought over from the Old Course at St. Andrews to help design the original layout, given to the founders as a memento of the collaboration. It has been there since the beginning.

The Course Today

Otsego Golf Club is nine holes on the shores of Otsego Lake, nine miles from Cooperstown. Four sets of tees make it playable for any skill level. If you want 18, start with the whites and turn to the blues. Every hole has a lake view. It is, still, one of the 80 oldest golf courses in America — a number that has climbed as the sport grew, but one that reflects something real: this place was here before nearly all of it.

You don't need to be a serious golfer to appreciate what you're walking. But if you are one, you'll know exactly what it means to play a course designed with input from St. Andrews, in continuous operation for over 130 years, shaped — season by season, decade by decade — by people who loved this lake.