History of Golf at Hotchkiss

In the fall of 1923 celebrated golf course architect Seth Raynor, a protégé of C. B. Macdonald, embarked on an unusual journey. Rather than heading to an upscale
country club, Raynor made his way to Hotchkiss, a private boys’ school in
northwestern Connecticut. He made three trips there that autumn, walking the
property and sketching a plan for a nine-hole layout, one of only two he would
build. The History of Golf at Hotchkiss explores Raynor’s decision to temporarily
set aside his mammoth project at Yale to design a course for Hotchkiss and to do
so at no charge.
The story revisits the sad and complicated life of Maria Hotchkiss, who was
abandoned for another woman, only to inherit a fortune from her philandering
husband, then reluctantly wrote a check to establish a private school for young
men in 1891. It chronicles the origins of the school’s first golf course, built in
1895, when boys hacked a rudimentary track out of tall grass and repurposed
flowerpots for holes, thereby establishing America’s first scholastic golf
organization. And it celebrates the best boys’ and girls’ golf teams to have
competed at the school, while noting some famous Hotchkiss alumni who played
club golf on the course.
Along the way, Bill Armistead (Class of 1971) shares the inspiring stories of
Charles Banks, a beloved Hotchkiss teacher, who in 1925 left the institution he
loved and joined Raynor to design and build golf courses, only to die at age 49,
and of the former student who overcame shell shock in World War I to win the
1929 U.S. Amateur Championship at Pebble Beach.
The History of Golf at Hotchkiss is not just the story of the school, its golf course,
and some of those who played it, but of architectural design principles passed
down by mentors, and of how three men shaped not only the layout at Hotchkiss
but of golf courses across the nation.