Essex County Club, MA, USA

Can you imagine a finer one shot hole?? Pictured is the uphill 11th at Essex County.

No secret why Essex County turned out so well – Donald Ross lived on the course from 1909 through 1913 and worked on it constantly. As a result, the course at Manchester-by-the-Sea features many of Ross’s design traits that are now recognized as distinguishing his finest work.

Essex County originally started as a nine hole course, which was typical of Boston's finest north shore courses. Salem Country Club and Myopia Hunt Club began in a similar manner.

Fortuitously, Essex Golf Chairman George Willett was a pupil of a young golf professional named Donald Ross at the Oakley Country Club, where Ross had been since his arrival in the United States in 1898. In 1908, Willett hired Ross to redesign their course. They acquired the necessary land to create an 18 hole course and Ross slowly went to work. He did several holes every year and throughout the process the course remained open. His work was not completed until 1917.

Pictured past the massive bunker that cuts across the 15th and 16th holes
is the house where Donald Ross lived for four years.

An aerial view shows that Ross had space considerations but he was quite clever in how he used such limitations to the betterment of the course. For instance, the 2nd and 6th greens border the club boundary and there is no more room to extend the tees backward. The maximum length each hole could ever play is in the 340 yard range. So what does Ross do? He builds two superlative crowned greens that can be desperately difficult to hold.

Thus, he transformed two holes that could easily have been non-descript into two of the more engaging holes on the course. To show such flair relatively early in his design career was a sure sign of things to come from Ross. Essex County is another instance where he lived up to his own design standard, which he wrote in 1914 was to 'build each hole in such a manner that it wastes none of the ground at my disposal, and takes advantage of every possiblity I can see.'

The 80 yard long bunker that extends from the crowned 6th green back toward the golfer.

The variety in the size of the bunkers remains amongst the very best in Ross’s entire portfolio. The mammoth bunkers that break up the long 3^rd, the 80 yard long bunker that snakes out from the 6^th green toward the golfer, the awesome pit bunkers with the native vegetation that sit beneath the right of 11^th green, the straight faced greenside bunker on the 15^th hole that extends thirty yards back into the fairway, and finally, the sprawling sand bunker that cuts across the 15^th and 16^th holes.

Puny bunkers would have done the scale and openness of Essex an injustice. When coupled with the unique New England terrain, Essex County enjoys a strong sense of being an original - it reminds you of no other course. No wonder that Brad Klein in his July 1999 Feature Interview selected Essex County as one of his favorite hidden gems.  In his Feature Interview on this site, Klein praised the use of fescue grasses and that the trees are kept well back from play.

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