Essex County Country Club

Overview: Essex County Country Club is an 18-hole, par-71 course in West Orange with a current championship yardage of 7,101 yards. Its design is a layered Golden Age composition: A.W. Tillinghast shaped the first course on the mountain, while Seth Raynor and Charles Banks later created the present strategic framework and retained seven Tillinghast holes. The property uses elevation, strong bunker lines and large green complexes to produce a demanding parkland test. The long seventh hole, a three-shot par five listed at 650 yards from the tips, is one of the clearest examples of the scale built into the layout.

History: Essex County Country Club was founded in 1887 as a hunt club and introduced golf in 1894. The club moved to its current West Orange site in 1917, where Tillinghast designed the first course on the mountain. Raynor and Banks redesigned the layout in 1925 and 1926, preserving seven Tillinghast holes while establishing the course seen today. Essex County was one of the founding clubs of both the New Jersey State Golf Association and the USGA. In October 2023, Gil Hanse began a restoration intended to recover the course’s historic lines and details.

Did You Know? Thomas Edison belonged to Essex County Country Club from 1889 until his death in 1931. The club also counts visits from Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft among the notable moments in its long history.