# The Best Golf Courses in Bedminster

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-bedminster-nj/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New Jersey


A leading golf course in New Jersey. Photo: Bain News Service, publisher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bedminster is horse country with a security detail. The farms are real, the hedges are high, and the golf is some of the most argued about in New Jersey, which is saying something in a state that argues about golf professionally. Three private clubs sit in and around this one Somerset County township, and between them they hold an old stable estate, a 54 hole members' playground, and a course that has spent a decade in the national news for reasons that only partly involve golf.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access, though access is a formality here: all three doors are private, and the estimates at this level of Somerset County golf run well into six figures before the first tee. So this ranking is really about the golf itself, and about which club you would choose if the invitations all arrived on the same morning.

## 1Hamilton Farm Golf Club (Gladstone)

The purist's pick takes No. 1. Hamilton Farm, over in Gladstone, was built by Hurdzan and Fry on an old stable estate, and the phrase matters. This was a working equestrian property, barns and paddocks and rolling Somerset Hills ground, and the design kept the estate's bones in the frame rather than bulldozing them into a blank canvas. American golf has a weakness for manufactured drama. Hamilton Farm's drama was already standing there in timber and pasture.

Hurdzan and Fry are the right names for that assignment. Their best work tends to look like it was found rather than built, and on estate land like this that instinct produces the most natural feeling golf in the township: holes that move with the property, a round that ends feeling like a walk around a great estate that happens to have greens on it. In a county full of clubs competing on facilities, Hamilton Farm competes on coherence, and coherence ages best.

The concession is fame. Hamilton Farm does not host the events, does not make the news, and does not try to. Golfers who measure a club by its television history will call this ranking wrong on principle. There is also the practical knock on estate golf everywhere: it can play gentle on a calm day, more beautiful walk than hard examination.

We will take the beautiful walk that is also good golf. Given one Bedminster membership and no cameras to please, Hamilton Farm is the choice, and choices are what rankings are for.

## 2Trump National Golf Club Bedminster

The famous one finishes second, and the golf itself deserves a fairer hearing than the headlines usually allow. Bedminster's championship course has hosted big time golf, a LIV event among it, and spent years at the centre of the sport's loudest arguments about who should host what. Strip the politics out, which a course ranking is obliged to try, and what remains is a big, hard, immaculately kept private course built to test tour players on land that rolls more than most visitors expect from New Jersey.

The scale is the point and also the problem. Everything here is amplified: the length, the conditioning, the clubhouse, the sense of occasion. For a golfer who wants the full production, nobody in the township does production like this. For a golfer who wants the golf to speak at a normal volume, the production can drown the holes out. Great courses trust their land. This one sometimes trusts its budget more, and the budget never loses an argument on the grounds crew's side of the ledger, even when the architecture would be better off quieter.

Second place, then, with respect for the test and the tournament record. If your ranking values the biggest stage, reverse our top two and we will understand. Ours values the course we would rather play on an ordinary Tuesday in October, and that is the estate in Gladstone.

## 3Fiddler's Elbow Country Club

Fiddler's Elbow is the members' answer to a question the other two never ask: what if a club just gave its people a lot of golf? Multiple courses, multiple personalities, one membership, in the middle of Bedminster's farm country. As a daily proposition for a local member, the variety here is a genuine asset. Nobody gets bored. Nobody has to drive to a second club to find a different kind of round.

That breadth is also why it finishes third in a ranking that scores the best golf rather than the most golf. A club spreading its attention across a whole campus rarely produces a single course that stands with the best individual designs in its neighbourhood, and this neighbourhood is cruelly strong: an estate course by Hurdzan and Fry on one side, a tour tested championship course on the other.

Third in Bedminster is still a club most New Jersey golfers would join before finishing this sentence. It is only a failure if you read rankings as insults. Read this one as a township with three private doors, all of them worth knocking on, and one old stable yard that turned into the best golf of the three.

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