Poland Spring Resort

Golf at Poland Spring began in 1896, when Arthur Fenn laid out a nine-hole course on the grounds of the famous spring-water resort, which by the early 1900s ranked among the largest resorts in the world. Fenn was self-taught and is regarded as the first native-born professional golfer in the United States, working in a field then dominated by Scottish designers. He balanced careful hazard placement with varied hole lengths and kept refining the course with new sod, wood ash, horse-drawn mowers, and grazing sheep. The nine-hole course was one of the first built at an American resort. In 1913 Donald Ross redesigned Fenn's layout and added a second nine, creating the eighteen holes that remain the main attraction of the 800-acre resort today. Poland Spring was a fixture of Maine's early championship calendar, hosting the Maine Open seven times between 1920 and 1929 and the Maine Amateur in 1922, 1954, 1956, and 1968.