Bald Peak Colony Club

Overview: Bald Peak Colony Club occupies the slopes above Lake Winnipesaukee, where Donald Ross’s routing makes use of the rising and falling ground rather than flattening it into a conventional parkland layout. Tree-lined fairways, changing elevations and views toward the lake give the course a mountain character, while the green complexes provide the sharper strategic test. The setting is secluded and architectural restraint is part of its appeal: the holes sit within the landscape of the Ossipee Mountains, with the lake and pine forests providing the scale.

History: Industrialist Thomas Gustave Plant developed the Bald Peak estate at the turn of the twentieth century with the idea of creating a country club among the hills above the lake. New Hampshire architect Chase Whitcher designed the original clubhouse, stables, boathouse and dormitory, while Donald Ross was engaged for the golf course. Bald Peak Country Club was incorporated in 1920, and Plant’s wider vision took shape soon afterward. The early club combined golf with the estate’s lakeside buildings and summer setting; the surviving structures still help explain the course’s original sense of place.

Did You Know? Thomas Plant’s nearby home, Castle in the Clouds, remains a public historic landmark even though it is no longer part of the club property. Bald Peak’s original buildings also survive on the hilltop, looking over a property of roughly a thousand acres framed by lakefront, pine forest and rolling ground. The course is therefore part of a much larger historic landscape, not an isolated set of fairways.