Manchester Country Club

Manchester Country Club opened in 1917 on South Main Street in Manchester, with a course laid out by two of the busiest designers of the era, Tom Bendelow and Devereux Emmet. Eighteen years later, in 1935, A.W. Tillinghast, the architect behind Winged Foot, Baltusrol and Bethpage Black, redesigned the layout, leaving Manchester with an unusual pedigree that ties together three significant names from golf's formative decades. The result is a compact parkland course of about 6,200 yards that rewards placement and touch more than raw power. The club welcomes both members and qualified nonmembers to its signature event, the Manchester Open, one of Connecticut's longest-running local tournaments, which each summer sends an amateur division out on Sunday and a professional division on Monday. Members also compete in a full slate of club championships and member-guest events, and the club has recently invested in an expanded eighteen-bay practice range and a new short-game area with a 3,000-square-foot green.