Cape Neddick Golf Club

Golf at Cape Neddick began in 1900, when John Pickering set three informal holes on his estate for family and friends. The course grew to six and then nine holes by the time the United States entered World War I, and in 1919 the club was incorporated as Cliff Country Club and hired Donald Ross to plan a full eighteen-hole course, completed by 1925. In 1949 fifteen of Pickering's friends bought the property and formed Cliff Realty Corporation, which has owned and operated the club ever since. Financial pressures around 1950 led the club to abandon nine holes, and for roughly half a century it played as a nine-hole course. Renamed Cape Neddick Country Club in 1990, it engaged architect Brian Silva, and when federally defined wetlands blocked restoring the lost Ross holes, Silva's team designed a new layout in the Ross style. The reconfigured eighteen, with new irrigation, ponds, and an expanded clubhouse, opened as a semi-private club in 1999.