Baltusrol Golf Club was three years old when it hosted its first major championship, the 1901 U.S. Women’s Amateur, at the time the most important championship in the women’s game. It was only the seventh playing, and only the fifth time the Robert Cox Trophy had been handed out to, as local newspapers printed at the time, “the finest golfer of the fairer sex.”

Previous host venues included places like the original Meadow Brook Club in Nassau County, N.Y., where hounds and horses roamed freely and always had the right-of-way; Essex Country Club in West Orange, another hunting property that was also the first country club ever established in New Jersey; Ardsley, America’s first residential real-estate club with members like J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt and various offspring of the Gould and Whitney families; Philadelphia Country Club where Byron Nelson would later win his only U.S. Open and where Virada Nirapathpongporn would beat Jane Park in another U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2003. Most notably, Morris County Golf Club hosted the second U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1896. It was the first club in America organized and managed solely by women.

Named after the farmer, Baltus Roll, who brought tomatoes and corn out of the dirt where the course now sits, Baltusrol Golf Club was founded by Louis Teller, the publisher of the New York Social Register. Turned out, Baltus was murdered on George Washington’s birthday in 1831, a horrific and brutal event dubbed the “crime of the century” at the time. Two men were arrested, although one was acquitted after the presiding judge disallowed the prosecution’s evidence. The other suspect, a vagrant, committed suicide before trial.

Once Teller took over the land and built the club, there was only one golf course, which negated the need to differentiate it with its own name. Only later, when the original design was plowed under by A.W. Tillinghast to make way for the current two courses – Upper and Lower – was the old course aptly named The Old Course.

Baltusrol’s Storied History Ready For A New Chapter

Its history in women’s golf is virtually unrivaled in America. And almost nobody knows it.

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