Manistee Golf & Country Club

Overview: Manistee Golf and Country Club is a lakeside course with a scale and history that feel unusual for a modern resort itinerary. The club’s current course page describes 5,614 yards of golf beside Lake Michigan, where sandy ground, mature vegetation and open views toward the beach and lighthouse shape the experience. The round is compact enough to reward walking and positional play, yet the shoreline setting keeps it from feeling like an ordinary inland parkland course. For a golfer travelling the western Michigan coast, it is a natural link between Manistee’s harbour, dunes and older civic history.

History: The club was incorporated in 1901, and Scottish architect Thomas Bendelow laid out its first nine holes that spring. After the club acquired additional farm and orchard land, W. Bruce Matthews designed the expanded layout, which held its grand opening on July 4, 1931. The course has continued to evolve, including a 1992 opening of rerouted holes near the lakeshore, but the present identity still rests on that Bendelow and Matthews sequence. The club’s long survival through Manistee’s changing lumber economy is part of the course story, not just background detail.

Did You Know? The first nine-hole layout was already in play during the summer of 1901. That makes Manistee’s golf history older than the current 18-hole routing by three decades, with the modern course carrying both chapters in its shoreline setting.