Town Rankings / New Jersey
The Best Golf Courses in Edison
Edison is famous for a light bulb, a Turnpike exit, and traffic. What it is not famous for, outside the game's inner circles, is hiding a top 100 golf course in America in the borough next door. But Edison's neighbour Plainfield holds a Donald Ross course, restored by Gil Hanse, that has hosted The Barclays twice, and the whole character of this ranking flows from that one improbable fact. A town known for the drive through it holds golf worth stopping for at the very highest level.
The bench is three private clubs, all in the cluster of old suburbs around Edison, Plainfield, Metuchen, and Colonia. Access, again, is a gate everywhere, estimates firmly in private club territory. So we score the golf and the pedigree, and the pedigree here is unusually easy to sort.
1Plainfield Country Club
Plainfield is the clear No. 1, a Donald Ross design restored by Gil Hanse that has hosted The Barclays twice, which means the PGA Tour brought its FedEx Cup playoffs to a borough course in central New Jersey and the course handled it. Top 100 in America on the serious lists. This is the full credential set: golden age architect, modern restoration by the most trusted restorer in the business, and a recent tournament record against the best players alive.
The Hanse restoration point deserves emphasis, because restorations decide whether classics live or fade. Ross courses suffered decades of well meaning tree planting and bunker softening across America. Hanse's work is known for giving them their teeth and their width back, and Plainfield emerged from that process as the version of itself that Ross would recognise, playable for members and serious enough for a playoff event. Not many courses serve both masters. The Barclays fields were not charity cases; the course asked them real questions.
The concession is the setting, and it is the same concession Edison itself makes. Plainfield does not have a coastline, a mountain, or a famous view. It has a great course in a New Jersey suburb, and the golfer who needs the setting to do half the work will underrate it. The golfer who scores architecture first will not. We score architecture first.
If someone in your life claims central New Jersey has no great golf, this course is the entire rebuttal, in one address, behind a private gate in a town people use as a punchline about the Turnpike. The joke is on them, permanently.
2Metuchen Golf and Country Club
Metuchen is the hometown club of this trio: a private course in the borough of Metuchen itself, serving one of those compact, train station suburbs that define this part of the state. Its golf life is the weekly version of the game, member tournaments, family memberships, a course that has to work for the same people every week of a long New Jersey season.
There is a hierarchy of virtues in club golf, and Metuchen sits squarely in the respected middle of it. Not a championship venue, not a Ross restoration with a tour event, but a real course with a real membership in a town that takes its institutions seriously. The Metuchen golfer does not apologise for the course, and from what reaches us, has no reason to: the club has held its ground in a competitive private market where members can defect in three directions.
The concession is altitude. Next to Plainfield, every club in this corridor is flying lower, and Metuchen's design story is a local one rather than a national one. Second in this town is still a membership most New Jersey golfers would take happily. It is only in the shadow of a top 100 course that second sounds like a demotion, and shadows that flattering are rare.
3Colonia Country Club
Colonia rounds out the three, a private club in the Woodbridge Township village of the same name, part of the same old suburban fabric: rail lines, postwar houses, and clubs founded when this was the countryside people escaped to from the city. Colonia's golf is the social, member centred game at its most traditional, and its members have kept it that way through decades when clubs all around it chased scale.
Third place here is a function of the field. Colonia does not claim a Ross, a Hanse, or a tour event, and in a ranking that leads with architecture and record, that settles the order. What it claims instead is continuity, which is not nothing. Clubs die all over New Jersey. The ones that survive in these old suburbs do it by being exactly what their members want, and Colonia has been that for a long time.
That is the Edison list: one national class course that most drivers on the Turnpike will never know they passed, and two honest members' clubs beneath it. The exit is worth taking. Getting through the gates is your problem, and it was always going to be.