Charleston Golf Guide: HIGH TIMES IN THE LOWCOUNTRY (page 3)

They thought golf dreadfully bourgeois. Their sport of choice was horse racing.
The contrast between the social activities of the South Carolina Golf Club and Jockey Club was stark. The focal point of the South Carolina Jockey Club, founded in 1788, was the track laid out at the Washington Race Course, which is now Hampton Park.
The maiden race was held on Feb. 15, 1793, with leading statesmen and planters in attendance. Race week was the peak of Charleston’s social season.
Members of the South Carolina Golf Club moved in different circles. They retired to coffee houses after a round at Harleston’s Green.
The Jockey Club remained a vital part of Charleston cultural until the Civil War, but golf faded from sight around the beginning of the 19th century, as President Jefferson’s embargo of 1808 seemed to seal the game’s disappearance.
The city’s commercial operations slowed dramatically, causing disintegration of the society of Scottish merchants who had spent their spare time chasing little balls into little holes.
As the Scottish mercantile class began to dissolve, Harleston’s Green gave rise to houses. It wasn’t long before all the holes in the greens were filled in, and the misshapen, feather-filled leather spheres that had rolled in them were a memory.

Today, of course, the Charleston area is a golfer’s delight.
It is endowed with such super layouts as Kiawah and Wild Dunes. The South Carolina Low Country, with its sprawling, yellow-green marshland and oaks dripped with moss, has proved an ideal setting for a game in which esthetics are as important as challenge.
But little old Harleston’s Green still looms large in the imagination.
How did it look, exactly?
What must it have been like for the early Scottish settlers, those social outcasts who resolutely hung on to the sport they had been raised on?
Slowly, but surely, they planted the golf seed in the new land.
Consider one Andrew Johnston, a merchant who arrived from Glasgow in 1759 with the proclamation that he had imported "a large assortment of goods."
When he died in 1764, Johnston listed the items in his will. Among them were "twelve goof (sic) sticks and balls."

- Jolee Edmondson

Winter 2004 - Washington Golf Monthly