Mark Twain Golf Course

Mark Twain Golf Course is the City of Elmira's municipal course, set just over the line in the Town of Horseheads. It was built in 1937 as a Works Progress Administration project, one of the many Depression-era relief jobs that gave American communities public golf. To lay it out, the city engaged Donald Ross, one of the best-known course architects of his time. Contemporary newspaper accounts describe Ross visiting Elmira to help select the site and working on a modest budget, for a fee well below what he had commanded in earlier years, and say he returned two years later to inspect the course as it grew in, a level of personal involvement unusual for him late in his career. The course is named for Mark Twain, who summered and wrote in Elmira for more than 20 years. Nearly nine decades later it remains a public 18-hole Ross design owned and operated by the city.