Medford Lakes Country Club

History

In the late 1920s, Medford Lakes was a vacation community in the New Jersey pines, some 18 miles southeast of Camden. One of its prominent citizens, Leon Todd, believed that a golf course was needed in order to provide residents and summer visitors with a complete range of recreational and sporting opportunities. In 1929, the Medford Lakes Development Company acquired the 115-acre Shrider farm. Alex Findlay, scarcely an unknown quantity in southern New Jersey, was brought in to lay out nine holes. His skillful use of both water and trees gave the course, though on the short side and with few changes in elevation, both interest and charm. It opened for play in 1930.

Some five or six years later, the golf course was incorporated as the Medford Lakes Country Club. Its first president was Charles Morrison, who remained in office until 1946 and single-handedly piloted the club through its difficult formative years, raising the funds necessary to put it on a sound fiscal basis.

For the first 40 years, Medford Lakes played its golf over the Findlay nine. In 1969, a second nine was added. Harold C. Purdy, who had apprenticed as a construction supervisor under Robert Trent Jones in the mid-1950s, designed and built the new holes. Purdy, a native of Wabash, Ind., could ultimately point to some 50 courses in the Garden State—35 new designs, 15 others which he remodeled or expanded—that bore his stamp.

Medford Lakes clubhouse, which was built in 1996.

Locations

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