The Apple Tree Gang: How Golf Came to America in 1888

The clubs arrived from Scotland in a brown paper parcel. There were six of them — three smooth-faced irons, three wooden-headed clubs — along with two dozen gutta-percha balls, sent by a club-maker in Dunfermline at the request of a Scots expatriate named John Reid who lived in Yonkers, New York. Reid had grown up near the old links country of Scotland and had not played since emigrating to America. When the parcel arrived in the autumn of 1887, he invited his neighbor Robert Lockhart, who had procured the clubs on a visit to Scotland, to come try them out. The two men did so in February 1888, in a cow pasture on Reid's property. American golf had begun.

The Pasture in Yonkers

The first layout was modest by any measure: three holes cut into a thirty-acre field on the north side of Broadway in Yonkers, just north of the New York City line. The ground was uneven and the holes improvised, but the principles were sound — a tee, a line of play, a hole in the ground. Reid and Lockhart played that first morning and found what generations of golfers before them had found: that the game, once started, would not easily be put down.

By the spring of 1888 Reid had gathered a small circle of Scottish-born friends and neighbors who shared his interest. On November 14, 1888, this group met formally and organized themselves as the Saint Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, named after the ancient Scottish course they all knew by reputation if not always by direct experience. Six founding members signed the club's initial records. Reid was elected president. The club's founding is recognized by the USGA and by golf historians as the establishment of the oldest continuously operating golf club in the United States.

The Apple Tree Gang

As the membership grew and the players became more accomplished, the club moved to progressively larger grounds. The third location, used beginning in 1892, was an apple orchard near what is now the Palisade Avenue area of Yonkers. The orchard's trees became a gathering point: the men would hang their coats and lunch baskets in the branches, congregate in the shade, and linger over the game and conversation. Someone — no single originator has been reliably identified — began to call them the Apple Tree Gang, and the name held. It had the right combination of informality and warmth, the sense of a club that was less an institution than a gathering of friends who happened to have found the same pastime.

Their equipment was entirely Scottish in origin. The gutta-percha balls they played were standard issue for the era — solid, reliable, demanding of a clean strike. The clubs were long-nosed woods and smooth irons, imported or copied from Scottish models, with hickory shafts wrapped in leather at the grip. There were no caddies in the early years, no professional, no formal instruction. The men taught each other and taught themselves, passing along corrections and observations between holes the way golfers have always done.

The Game Spreads South and West

The Saint Andrews Golf Club was not the only early attempt to establish golf in America — the Oakhurst Links in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, has a plausible claim to an 1884 founding, and there were scattered earlier efforts — but it became the organizational and cultural anchor from which organized American golf expanded. The United States Golf Association was founded in 1894, in large part to bring order to a rapidly multiplying collection of clubs and competitions. By that point there were clubs in Newport, Brookline, Chicago, and a dozen other cities. Most traced some connection, direct or indirect, to the enthusiasm of Reid's circle and the model they had provided.

The men of the Apple Tree Gang were not extraordinary athletes or wealthy patrons on the model of British club founders. They were merchants and professionals, men who had left Scotland and found in the game a portable piece of the country they had left behind. That quality — golf as a transportable culture, as much as a transportable sport — is part of what gave it staying power in American soil. It did not require a particular landscape or a particular class. It required only a stretch of open ground and someone willing to cut a few holes in it.

The Detail That Stays

The image of John Reid and five companions hanging their coats in an apple tree while playing golf on an improvised course in a New York suburb has an appealing domesticity to it. This was not a grand founding — no ceremony, no dignitaries, no proclamation. It was a group of men who liked a game, made space for it in the middle of an ordinary life, and refused to stop playing. The formality came later, as it usually does. What came first was simply the playing.

Why It Still Matters

The United States today has more golf courses than any other nation, and the game's commercial and cultural presence in American life is substantial enough that it can be easy to forget how recently and how quietly it arrived. The Apple Tree Gang did not know they were founding anything. Reid sent for clubs because he missed the game, not because he intended to plant it in a continent. That casualness of origin — a parcel from Dunfermline, a pasture in Yonkers, six men on a cold February morning — is worth remembering whenever American golf presents itself as something inevitable. It was not inevitable. It was somebody's idea of a pleasant afternoon, extended forward by habit and love until it became something larger than anyone in that apple orchard could have imagined.