How Binghamton Country Club Found Its Tillinghast Home

The club moved three times before A.W. Tillinghast chose a farm above the Susquehanna Valley and left behind a design with an unusually strong paper trail.

A vintage postcard offers a bird’s-eye view from Binghamton Country Club across the Susquehanna River and the surrounding valley. The postcard’s exact date remains unknown. Credit: Vintage postcard. Original publisher and photographer unidentified. Image digitally restored.

Binghamton Country Club gave members of the Golf Heritage Society an appropriate first course for convention week in New York’s Southern Tier. The club dates its beginning to 1889, yet the course played in Endwell is not its original ground. It is the fourth home in a story of relocation, ambition and one consequential decision: when A.W. Tillinghast said the existing property would not support the course the club wanted, its leaders listened.

The club did not lose the paper trail. Letters exchanged during the land search survive, as does Tillinghast’s signed contract for the design and construction work. Read in sequence, they follow Binghamton from a river property that could not be expanded to the Endwell farm where the 1923 course was built.

Four Homes in 34 Years

The club historian’s chronology begins with Fred Denton Weed, a Binghamton resident who was home before his senior year at Harvard in the summer of 1889. Weed and a group of friends organized what they called the Broome County Country Club. Their first course was near Floral Avenue in Binghamton. The club then moved to land near the present En-Joie Golf Club before establishing a third course in the winter of 1897.

That nine-hole layout sat between what is now Route 17C and the Susquehanna River in Endwell. It appeared in Josiah Newman’s 1899 Official Golf Guide, which confirmed the 1889 founding and praised the turf, river setting and a creek that supplied water hazards. In 1904, the organization incorporated and adopted the Binghamton Country Club name.

Nine holes carried the club through its early years, but the property’s limits became harder to ignore. The membership included business leaders whose companies helped define the region, among them A. Ward Ford of Bundy Manufacturing, Willis Sharpe Kilmer and George F. Johnson of Endicott-Johnson. An 18-hole course was becoming an expectation as well as a sporting goal.

Johnson’s presence on that membership list adds another layer to the area’s golf history. He later created En-Joie for Endicott-Johnson workers who could not have afforded the private club he joined. The courses developed for different constituencies, yet their histories overlap geographically and personally. Binghamton’s second location was near the ground where En-Joie would open in 1927. One man’s place in both stories helps explain how golf spread through the Southern Tier in private and public forms.

Tillinghast Chose the Ground

A.W. Tillinghast in 1909, roughly a dozen years before Binghamton Country Club retained him to design its new course in Endwell. Credit: “Hazard,” The American Golfer, April 1909, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Binghamton’s board initially expected Tillinghast to expand the river course. He inspected it and rejected that plan. The club’s published history says he required a more suitable tract and was given authority to search the surrounding area. He settled on a farm in what is now Endwell, ground with elevation and views across the valley that the earlier riverside site could not offer.

The paper trail is unusually useful. The club says its archive retains Tillinghast’s correspondence with the board about possible sites and the signed agreement for the new course. The contract called for $500 when the agreement was executed, $1,000 when complete plans were delivered and another $1,000 when the course was complete and playable. The final payment tied the architect to the finished result, not merely to drawings sent from a distant office.

Binghamton engaged him during a fertile stretch in his career. His work at Baltusrol, Philadelphia Cricket Club, Winged Foot and San Francisco Golf Club belongs to the same general period. The Tillinghast Association includes Binghamton in its course listings, while the club’s own records identify his role from site selection through construction. The current course formally opened Aug. 25, 1923.

What Happened to the Original Layout

The course Binghamton opened in 1923 has not remained fixed in place. During the Depression, the club lost some bunkers when it lacked the money to maintain them. Trees added years later eventually crowded fairways and obscured the valley scenery Tillinghast had selected. Regular mowing gradually pulled several greens inward, and winter damage led to more than one rebuild.

More recent work has removed trees, reopened views and returned bunkers to the course. Other parts remain harder to recover. The club’s history points specifically to green shapes that no longer fit comfortably within the surrounding layout. Decisions in those areas require an understanding of what stood there before, along with what the course needs today.

Tillinghast’s surviving correspondence and signed construction contract give Binghamton an unusually strong archival record. When questions arise about the course, the club can consult documents created during the search for land and the building of its present home. Those records cannot answer every question about a bunker, green or playing angle, but they offer more than memory alone. 

Palmer and Littler Came to Endwell

Binghamton’s national profile has often arrived one visiting player at a time. The club records exhibitions by Walter Hagen in 1926 and Gene Sarazen in 1932. Its best-known match came Aug. 2, 1961, when Arnold Palmer faced Gene Littler before 1,500 paying spectators.

The timing could hardly have been better. Littler had won the U.S. Open in June. Palmer arrived after winning The Open at Royal Birkdale in July. According to the club’s account, the admission charge was $3, Littler shot 69 and Palmer shot 70. For one afternoon, a course that had not become a national championship site placed two reigning major winners on the same tee.

The club’s account makes the Palmer-Littler exhibition unusually easy to reconstruct: Littler shot 69, Palmer 70 and about 1,500 people watched. The Tillinghast material answers a different set of questions. His correspondence and contract document the club’s move from its river property, the selection of the Endwell farm and the construction of the course that opened in 1923. GHS members walked that ground in 2026 with the paper record still available to explain how it came to be.