Golf in Foxburg

Foxburg's claim rests on a single extraordinary fact: the Foxburg Country Club, founded in 1887, is recognized as the oldest golf course in continuous operation in the United States. Joseph Fox, a Pittsburgh merchant who learned the game in Scotland, returned to his family's Clarion County riverside land and laid out nine holes that have been played without interruption since the Cleveland administration. The Allegheny River runs below the club, and the wooded riverside setting in a county of 35,000 people makes Foxburg an unlikely home for American golf history. Clarion County is sparsely populated, economically modest, and far from any urban golf market — which makes the club's survival and distinction more remarkable, not less. A visit to Foxburg is both a round of golf and a trip through the game's American origins, on ground that has hosted players for nearly 140 years.