# Chattanooga Golf and Country Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/chattanooga-golf-and-country-club-profile/

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Course Profiles / Tennessee


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The last hole is a par 3. Sit with that for a second. A Donald Ross course in Chattanooga, founded in 1896 and described as the oldest golf course in Tennessee still on its original site, ends not with a long par 4 into the clubhouse or a reachable par 5 for the gamblers, but with a one shot hole. One swing decides how the round closes. Ross courses make you think on the greens all day. This one makes you commit on the final tee.

The full card is short by modern habit: par 71 at 6,104 yards. Modern golfers see 6,104 and start relaxing. That is a mistake, and it is the same mistake golfers have made at Ross courses for a century. Length was never the whole test here. Position and putting are the test, and a short card with Ross greens asks both questions on every hole.

## Bobby Jones came here and won

Bobby Jones won the 1920 Southern Amateur at this club. Jones in 1920 was a teenager becoming the player the next decade would belong to, and the Southern Amateur was a serious championship, not a junior exhibition. The tournament returned in 1931 and 1940, which tells you the club stayed in the championship conversation after Jones left. The Tennessee State Amateur was played here in 2013 and 2023, so the conversation is not only historical. The club says Golf Digest has consistently ranked the course in Tennessee's top five, and we place it accordingly in [our Chattanooga town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-chattanooga-tn/) and in [the full Tennessee state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-tennessee/).

The restoration story is the modern chapter. In the early 2000s, Bill Bergin brought back the original Ross greens and removed hundreds of trees. Hundreds. Tree removal at that scale changes everything a Ross course is supposed to be: light reaches the greens, air moves, and the views the site always had come back. In this case the views are of the river and downtown Chattanooga, opened up by cutting. For decades the course sat behind its own trees, playing narrower and darker than Ross drew it. Bergin's work gave it back its setting, and a Ross course with its setting restored is a different argument than a Ross course surviving on a name.

That distinction matters for how we score it. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. A restored set of original greens is golf. River views are the day. Chattanooga, after the restoration, has both, and it did not have both before the trees came down.

## Small card, old bones, real limits

The concession comes in two parts. First, 6,104 yards is 6,104 yards. Strong modern players will overpower parts of this course, and no amount of green complexity fully answers a wedge in hand. Ross built for hickory era distances and his courses defend themselves with surfaces, not yardage. On the days when a good player is putting well, the defense thins out.

Second, the club is private. The oldest course in Tennessee on its original site, a Jones championship, a proper restoration: none of it is available on a public tee sheet. If you are invited, go, and pay attention to the greens rather than the yardage on the card. Estimates for private clubs of this standing are well into six figures, stated as an estimate, and that wall keeps this piece of Tennessee golf history behind a gate.

There is also a quieter point about the finishing par 3. Courses are usually remembered by their hardest hole or their prettiest one. A closing one shotter does something else. It compresses the whole round into a single committed swing in front of whoever is watching, with no fairway to hide in and no layup to negotiate. Members live with that finish for decades. Guests remember it on the drive home. Ross, or the ground he worked with, understood theater long before golf had a word for it.

Still. A course founded in 1896, still on its ground, still hosting its state amateur in 2023, ending on a par 3 the way it always has. Tennessee golf starts here, literally, and after Bergin took the trees down and gave the river back, it plays like a beginning worth returning to.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.