Elcona Country Club

Overview: In Bristol, Elcona Country Club presents a private parkland routing over 18 holes in Bristol, Indiana, shaped first by William Diddle and later by Arthur Hills. The current record lists par 72 and 6,880 yards. Mature tree lines, bentgrass fairways and Poa annua greens give the course a distinctly northern Indiana texture, while the rolling ground provides the movement for its fairways and approaches. Elcona is also a Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, so the playing experience is closely tied to the management of the surrounding habitat rather than separated from it.

History: The club was organized in 1955 using land associated with Elcona Farm, and construction began in 1956. The National Register account records the first foursome playing the course on June 29, 1957, with Ernie Sims, William Diddle, John Dille Jr. and Walter Wells among the players involved in its creation. Elcona later commissioned Arthur Hills for a master renovation plan in the mid-1990s; the grounds blog records that the work was completed in 2006. That sequence matters because the course's identity is both a Diddle original and a Hills-era renovation.

Did You Know? “Elcona” was taken from Elcona Farm, a contracted form of Elkhart County. The club's origin story therefore remains attached to the working property that preceded the course, rather than to a purely invented golf name.