Salt Lake Country Club maintains an elegant profile

For 110 years, The Country Club has hosted presidents of the United States, princes of entertainment and some of the prime golf players in the world.

When it was founded in 1898 by three Yale graduates and a few of their friends, it was, as reporter Elaine Jarvik reported in the June 26, 1999, Deseret News on the occasion of the club's centennial, "pretty much just a pasture with some holes in it."

"But over the years it became something else: the closest Utah comes to having high society."

In 1898, "The Country Club" was an adequate name to identify the organization. That's still the official name, although it is almost always referred to as the Salt Lake Country Club.

The club played host to William Howard Taft in 1909 and Warren G. Harding in 1923. In 1942, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby played there when the club hosted their USO charity golf tournament. In 1977 Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer joined a pair of Utah State Amateur champions for an exhibition round. The club has also hosted countless golf tournaments.

Deseret News photographers have captured on film many of the notable events at The Country Club, which was incorporated in 1899. Photo researcher Ron Fox has assembled many of these photos, which can be seen on the upper right-hand side of this page.

The Country Club has survived lots of changes. Its current location at the mouth of Parleys Canyon is its third. That original pasture is now the Gilmer Park neighborhood. From there it moved to Forest Dale on 900 East, and in the early 1920s the course and club moved to its present location.

The Country Club hosted one of its most notable guests at the Forest Dale location in 1909 when President Taft spent an afternoon there. Taft, who weighed more than 300 pounds, made an impression at the course.

A news account in the Sept. 26, 1909, Salt Lake Herald-Republican noted: "President Taft, on entering the clubhouse, immediately ensconced himself in a big easy chair, and there enjoyed a purely informal half hour's conversation with Senator Reed Smoot, Senator George Sutherland, Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, Governor William Spry, Congressman Joseph Howell, Mayor John S. Bransford and Captain Archibald W. Butt."

An unidentified news clipping from the same time recorded Taft's exhibition of golfing prowess: