A HISTORY OF Golf in the city of lincoln
1900 - 2025
Golf has been played in Lincoln, Nebraska since 1900, when the first members of the Lincoln Golf Club played in a pasture northwest of the intersection of 27th and A Streets. Over the next 125 years, many private Country Clubs and public and municipal golf courses have operated throughout the city.
On April 4, 1887, Scottish immigrant Alexander Findlay became the first person to play golf in America, when he completed a six-hole round on the course at Merchiston Ranch in Nance County, Nebraska.
Findlay, who learned golf as a boy at Montrose, Scotland immigrated to America in early 1887 to work as a cowhand for his childhood friend, Edward C. Millar, a prominent breeder of Clydesdales, English Shire Horses, and Shetland Ponies, at a time when draught horses were an essential part of agriculture and transportation in Nebraska.
Upon arriving in Nebraska's sea of grassland in March of 1887, the 20-year-old Findlay was reminded of the landscapes in Scotland and Ireland where he played golf as a young man. Within a month, Findlay had routed a primitive six-hole course across a "a pasture where the spring growth was still insufficient", where he played one of the first round of golf in America. For the next three years, Findlay taught the game of golf to the "cowboys, cattle barons, and Indians who passed through the ranch on the Union Pacific Railroad." Visitors to the ranch who were convinced to try the game included Buffalo Bill Cody, Sitting Bull, and Theodore Roosevelt.
“The believers were greatly outnumbered by the scoffers. Buffalo Bill persistently ridiculed golf and rebuked Findlay for defiling the plains with divot marks. Teddie Roosevelt couldn't understand why the hard-riding Scotch cowhand played such a leisurely game."
- Nebraska State Journal, Page 4. April 4, 1987
In 1889, Findlay left Nebraska and tried popularizing the game of golf at U.S. Cavalry outposts in Wyoming and then Denver. Findlay returned to Nebraska in 1893 and brought the game to Omaha, where he laid out the state's first nine-hole course on the estate of John Nelson Hays Patrick called [[Dundee–Happy Hollow Historic District|Happy Hollow]]. The course would be home to the Omaha Golf Club from 1897 until it dissolved and some of its members founded Happy Hollow Club.
In 1899, two years after establishing the first golf club in Nebraska, Findlay returned to England and played four rounds with [[Harry Vardon]] at [[Ganton Golf Club]] in Yorkshire. During the round, Findlay convinced a skeptical Vardon to travel to America. In October of the following year, Vardon took his first voyage to the United States and won the [[1900 U.S. Open (golf)|1900 U.S. Open]].