Town Rankings / New Jersey

The Best Golf Courses in Bernardsville

There is almost no signage. That is the first thing to understand about golf in Bernardsville, out in the Somerset Hills where the horse farms roll and the old money learned a century ago that the correct volume for wealth is a whisper. You can drive past one of the fifty best courses in America and notice nothing but a gap in the hedge. The locals prefer it that way, and after a while in this part of New Jersey, so do you.

Three private clubs make the bench here, all of them old, all of them members' courses in the strict sense. Access is not really part of this argument, since none of these doors opens to the public and the estimates at this level are the kind clubs never print. So the ranking is the golf, the land, and the company each course keeps in the game's memory.

1Somerset Hills Country Club

Somerset Hills is the argument ender. A.W. Tillinghast built it in 1917, and it sits in the top 50 in America on most serious lists, hiding in horse country with almost no signage, exactly as the hook for this town puts it. Tillinghast in 1917 was becoming Tillinghast: the bold internal contour on the greens, the bunkering that thinks in diagonals, the sense that a hole should ask a question on the tee and grade the answer at the green. Somerset Hills has all of it, preserved by a membership that understood early what it owned.

The course's defenders will tell you it is the most underrated of the great American classics, and for once the underrated claim has math behind it. It lacks a major championship on the record, lacks the television exposure that inflates other reputations, and sits in a state where two or three louder names absorb the attention. What it has instead is the thing rankings are supposed to reward: hole after hole of design intelligence on lovely, rolling, quiet land.

The concession is access in its most absolute form. Somerset Hills is not merely private, it is private in the old Somerset Hills manner, which means most golfers will know this course the way they know a painting in a private house: by reputation and reproduction. That does not lower the golf. It does mean our No. 1 is, for nearly every reader, a rumour with a Tillinghast routing.

Rumour or not, it wins by a distance that makes the rest of this list a fight for second. Some towns have a debate at the top. Bernardsville has a landmark and two very good clubs beneath it.

2Morris County Golf Club

Second place goes to Morris County, the other classic name in this orbit, a members' club from the game's early American decades over in the Morristown side of the county. Morris County belongs to the game's early American generation, the era when the sport here was run by the clubs themselves, and it has carried itself like an institution from that founding period ever since.

On the ground, that translates to old school golf: a course that values placement and nerve, greens that punish the casual approach, and a membership culture built around the game rather than the amenities arms race. In the Somerset Hills and Morris County corridor, where clubs compete on everything, Morris County competes on being a golf club, full stop. There are golfers who would take that over a famous architect's signature, and on the right day we are among them.

The knock is simply the company. Morris County's design pedigree, while genuinely old and honourable, does not sit at Tillinghast 1917 altitude, and in a head to head for architectural greatness it loses to its neighbour the way almost every course in America loses to Somerset Hills. Second here is a compliment most clubs in New Jersey would frame.

3Spring Brook Country Club

Spring Brook completes an all private, all classic podium, which tells you what kind of place the Somerset Hills is. This is a Morristown area club of the same broad vintage as its neighbours, built for the summer and weekend population that once came out from the city by train and stayed for the season. The golf is traditional, the setting is the rolling green county that makes this corner of New Jersey feel like a different state from the one on the license plates.

Spring Brook's honest limitation is that it plays third in a trio where the other two hold historical trump cards: a top 50 Tillinghast and a founding era institution. A course can be lovely, well kept, and beloved by its members for a century and still finish third in this company, and Spring Brook's members, who did not join for the rankings, will survive the news.

That is the Bernardsville story in one list. Drive the lanes slowly, mind the horses, and accept that the best golf here was settled a long time ago by a man named Tillinghast, in 1917, behind a hedge with no sign on it.