Late one sunny afternoon last June, I pulled into the Mountain View Country Club in Greensboro, Vermont, just as the Tuesday evening men's league was getting started. Mountain View, a semiprivate nine-hole course built in 1898, was once what is known locally as a cow-pasture course. Its holes were laid out, ingeniously and with no earth-moving equipment, on cleared grazing land overlooking idyllic Caspian Lake. Maples and oaks have since grown in around the holes, and the greens are now maintained to high modern standards, but the quirky, handmade nature of Mountain View still shines through. The fairways, for instance, ripple and hump the same way they did a century ago. And the people around Greensboro love their little course all the more for it.
Pat Hussey, who manages the hardware store in nearby St. Johnsbury, insisted I join his team in the competition, and I happily plunked down my sixteen-dollar greens fee. "You'll love it," he promised. And I did.
The thing about playing off-the-radar courses like Mountain View in the part of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom—basically the northeast quadrant of the state, just below Canada—is that you check your usual expectations in the parking lot and engage in golf the way I like to imagine that kids do: Here's the tee box, there's the flagstick; let's see who can get the ball in the hole in the fewest strokes.
The routing at Mountain View starts uphill then loses all that ground in one fell 150-foot swoop on the par-three third. After some big sweeping holes along the flats, the course climbs again on the short par-four eighth. "The good news is your ball's in the middle of the fairway," Hussey informed me after my drive on that hole. "The bad news is you've got no shot at the green." A tall pine juts up from the precise center of this fairway, and the golfer's job is to figure out some way around it.
Afterward, at the men's league cookout in the maintenance shed, I learned that William Rehnquist, former chief justice of the United States, was a longtime summer resident in the area and had been a member at Mountain View until his death in 2005. "He liked it because we treated him just like anybody else up here," the head of the greens committee told me.
I also heard some grumbling about the new clubhouse, a modest cedar structure that nevertheless cost $500,000, over half of which had been donated by members. Not everybody preferred the new place over the tumbledown starter's shack that had been the club's heart and soul since the 1950s. Fancification runs against the grain in the Northeast Kingdom, which is precisely why a golf trip to the region can be so refreshing. You won't find any cart-mounted GPS yardage systems here, nor anything resembling a golf concierge. But you will find friendly people who love the game—and possibly the opportunity to rediscover why you love the game so much yourself.
The best and most sophisticated course in the Northeast Kingdom is the semiprivate St. Johnsbury Country Club. The original nine, with rash elevation changes and several blind tee shots, was designed in 1923 by Willie Park Jr., who also built Sunningdale in England. About fifteen years ago the club engaged Geoffrey Cornish to oversee the addition of a second nine encircling the first, but it wasn't as if the members just raised the money and wrote a check—first, because the St. Johnsbury area is not rolling in cash, and second, because Vermonters are inveterate do-it-yourselfers. In the end, the new nine cost only $700,000, with the vast majority of that sum coming from voluntary debentures purchased by members. Cornish, the patriarch of New England golf architects, lives in western Massachusetts and accepted no fee. Several club members donated manpower and equipment to help with construction; one, an architect, did most of the drawing for free; and everyone chipped in with advice.
The result is a splendid and eccentric eighteen. Cornish's home nine builds toward a remarkable run of finishing holes that includes two diabolical downhill par threes and the perfectly proportioned uphill par-four fourteenth that sweeps around a rock outcropping. The eighteenth requires precision off the tee followed by a short, unavoidably risky approach to an elevated green beneath the clubhouse veranda. Conditioning, in season, is uniformly excellent.
St. Johnsbury has an active membership, but visitors are made to feel welcome at any time, and greens fees, as everywhere in the Kingdom, are modest. I played with Tim Thompson, a Yale grad and self-described country doctor who with proprietary affection regaled me with the design history of every hole as well as his suggestions for future tweaks. He also insisted that I couldn't leave St. Johnsbury without playing two other nine-hole courses, each entirely handmade.
The first of these is five miles east of town on a two-lane highway that winds through low hills with many cleared pastures. If you're like me, the sight of so much rolling greensward on a summer day fills you with golf lust and idle thoughts of hitting an eight-iron approach from that little swale to a green nestled in the saddle of the next rise—an urge satisfied at Kirby Country Club, created by Marc Poulin from eighty-five acres of family pasture land. Poulin designed and built the nine-holer seven years ago with only a bit of professional help—primarily with the greens—from the superintendent at St. Johnsbury.
"I had to do a little bit of leveling with a bulldozer, but not too much, really," he told me in the one-room clubhouse. Poulin, 78, a retired logger, placed the greens and tee boxes exactly where any self-respecting course designer from 1900 would have: on the high spots of the landscape to permit drainage. Each green required five or six truckloads of sand plus a layer of topsoil and some bent-grass seed. Creating fairways was just a matter of mowing and fertilization. Presto—a golf course.
"It wasn't too good at first," Poulin admitted, standing in the middle of the clubhouse, legs apart, wearing work boots, suspender jeans and a de rigueur red plaid Vermont shirt. "But we've kept working at it, and now people seem to like it."
On long summer evenings the course is mobbed, as locals like to squeeze in nine or eighteen holes after work. Weekends are so busy you'd be well advised to book a tee time in advance. But any other time you can walk on at Kirby, as I did, and enjoy a round that might make you want to don knickers and tee up a gutta-percha ball. A few of the holes are gems, especially the 355-yard eighth, with its pulpit green. It doesn't take long to forget about the usual accoutrements of golf courses, like distance markers and manicured lies, and to start engaging Kirby on its own fun terms. The greens, though not quick, putt surprisingly true. Last year Poulin added a second set of tees, which adds variety to a second go-round.
From Kirby, it's a thirty-minute drive to the second handmade course Thompson recommended, but along the way I happened upon yet another one in a pasture behind the Berry Tire Company in the hamlet of East Lyndon. When I stopped to inquire, Everett Berry explained that his son-in-law, a renowned Vermont skier who died in an auto accident five years ago, built this simple par-three course nine years ago as a place for his family and invited friends to practice and play. The longest hole is 145 yards, and Berry still mows the bent-grass greens every three days with the professional greens-mowing machine the family bought used—when it's working. "We've had a lot of fun on that course over the years," Berry said.
My destination, as it turned out, was another backyard course—perhaps the ultimate such course—called Grandad's Invitational, outside a tiny crossroads called Newark. To play it you place five dollars in a mailbox near the front porch of Ralph Chase's farmhouse and help yourself to a scorecard.
Chase is not actually a farmer, but his grandfather ran a dairy farm that he visited often as a boy. Not long after Chase took over the farm in 1981, his daughters gave him some specialized grass seed for Father's Day with which to build a practice green out back. By 1991 he had cultivated nine excellent greens and some fairways to go with them, and opened his little pleasure dome to anyone who could find it.
Thompson had warned me that the first hole, all of forty-two yards, is the most difficult opener in golf. "Ernie Els's knees would be shaking," he said, and rightly so, because the tiny green sits directly behind a large goldfish pond and directly in front of a thicket. Forty-two yards is not an easy distance. I hit two balls—one wet, one in the trees—before I found the putting surface. The next seven holes are easier and delightful, ranging from 76 to 213 yards, a couple featuring sand, but the pond again comes into play on the sixty-three-yard home hole. I advise playing it as a two-shotter.
Base camp for any visit to the northeast kingdom should be in or around St. Johnsbury. The town's two landmarks, both worth seeing, are the 1871 Athenaeum, which boasts of having the oldest unaltered art gallery in the United States, and the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, where cases of biological marvels and Indian artifacts seem not to have changed since Teddy Roosevelt's day.
But St. Johnsbury is slowly spiffing itself up. It has several excellent restaurants, a number of superior small inns and bed-and-breakfasts, and even a well-equipped spa. Postcard-pretty Peacham, southwest of St. Johnsbury, is one of Vermont's most scenic villages and a noted antique center, as is Craftsbury, forty-five minutes northwest. Farther north is Newport Country Club, a scenic semiprivate course with a handful of terrific holes and great views across a lake into Canada.
Closer to St. Johnsbury, however, is Orleans Country Club. The facility, open to the public (there seem to be only five completely private courses in all of Vermont), is probably the most popular spot in Orleans for three or four months of the year. The white clapboard clubhouse serves a fine lunch and dinner, and you won't stay a stranger there for long.
The course itself, though not as challenging as St. Johnsbury's, is easy to walk, fun to play and not without its highlights. The back nine, built in 1928 on the town's old carnival grounds, has a par three whose green is completely encircled by mounds with bunkers on the other side—a common feature of courses from that era but rarely maintained into modern times. The club has quite a few good players, including one native son now playing on the Nationwide Tour and another member whose twelve-year-old son has—yes, it must be contagious—designed and built his own backyard course west of town. It's called Duffy's Golf and you can play it, too, by dropping five dollars in the mailbox.
Vermonters by reputation are cussed, laconic folk who do things their own way. In my experience, when it comes to golf only the last of those characterizations applies. And in several ways, even though the terrain could hardly be more different, golf in the Northeast Kingdom reminded me of golf as it is played in out-of-the-way places in Scotland. The game flows up from the ground rather than being imposed on it by the received convention of what courses are supposed to be. People love golf for the most basic of reasons: being outdoors with friends, hitting a ball around with a stick. And they don't care a lick for making it fancy.
Trip Planner: Vermont's Northeast Kingdom
Where to Play
Grandad's Invitational
Newark (call for directions). Nine holes. Architect: Ralph Chase, 1991. Yardage: 1,110. Par: 30. Greens Fees: $5-$10. Contact: 802-467-3739.
Kirby Country Club
661 Route 2, Concord. Nine holes. Architect: Marc Poulin, 2000. Yardage: 2,776. Par: 35. Slope: 104. Greens Fees: $11-$16. Contact: 802-748-9200.
Mountain View Country Club
112 Country Club Road, Greensboro. Nine holes. Architect: Unknown, 1898. Yardage: 2,927. Par: 35. Slope: 114. Greens Fees: $16-$28. Contact: 802-533-7477, mvcc.biz.
Newport Country Club
590 Mount Vernon Street, Newport. Eighteen holes. Architect: Ralph Barton, 1922. Yardage: 6,491. Par: 72. Slope: 109. Greens Fee: $34. Contact: 802-334-2391, newportscountryclub.com.
Orleans Country Club
316 Country Club Lane, Orleans. Eighteen holes. Architect: Alex Reid, 1928. Yardage: 6,191. Par: 72. Slope: 121. Greens Fees: $32-$34. Contact: 802-754-2333, homepage.mac.com/crowleyvt/occ/occ/index.htm.
St. Johnsbury Country Club
Route 5, St. Johnsbury. Eighteen holes. Architect: Willie Park Jr., 1923; Geoffrey Cornish, 1990. Yardage: 6,392. Par: 70. Slope: 131. Greens Fees: $42-$49. Contact: 802-748-9894, stjohnsburycountryclub.com.
Where to Stay
Comfort Inn & Suites St. Johnsbury New and well done, five minutes from St. Johnsbury CC. 703 Route 5 South, St. Johnsbury; 866-464-2408, vermontvacationland.com. Rooms: from $120.
The Wildflower Inn A cozy B&B with panoramic views. 2059 Darling Hill Road, Lyndonville; 800-627-8310, wildflowerinn.com. Rooms: from $180.
The Inn at Mountain View Farm Set on a historic estate; miles of hiking and biking trails. 3383 Darling Hill Road, East Burke; 800-572-4509, innmtnview.com. Rooms and suites: from $155.
Other Attractions
Elements Food and Spirit Try the trout cakes at this mill-turned-restaurant. 98 Mill Street, St. Johnsbury; 802-748-8400, elementsfood.com. $$
River Garden Café A riverside scene with a chalkboard of daily specials and fresh fish. 427 Route 114, Main Street, East Burke; 802-626-3514, rivergardencafe.com. $$$
Stepping Stone Spa and Wellness Center Full-service spa facilities plus tasty organic lunches. 1545 Darling Hill Road, Lyndonville; 802-626-3104.
