Town Rankings / West Virginia

The Best Golf Courses in Parkersburg

Parkersburg sits where the Little Kanawha meets the Ohio River, and its golf is a two course town. That is the whole bench and this list will not inflate it: one old river country club across in Vienna, one public course in town, and between them the complete golf life of a Mid Ohio Valley city. Some towns on this site get six courses and an argument. Parkersburg gets a clear No. 1, a clear No. 2, and a short essay about why that arrangement works fine.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Here the criteria point in opposite directions, the club winning the golf and the public course winning everything a non member cares about, and the ranking says so in the open.

1Parkersburg Country Club

Parkersburg Country Club dates to 1902, which puts its founding in the first wave of American golf, when a river city of its size getting a club at all marked it as a place with ambition. It sits in Vienna, the suburb just north, in the Ohio River valley its members have played for well over a century. Golf that old in a town this size becomes load bearing: the club is where Parkersburg's golf memory lives, its championships, its families, its junior golfers who grew up to run the town.

The concession is the standing one for a 1902 private club in a small market. The test is a members' test from another era of the game, the audience is a membership list, and nearly every golfer reading this will experience the club, if at all, as a guest at an outing.

None of that moves it off the top. The best golf course in Parkersburg is the old club in Vienna, by history, by setting and by the weight a century of continuous play puts behind every hole. No. 1, plainly.

2Worthington Golf Club

Worthington is the public course in town, which in a two course market makes it the more important property for most golfers even while it ranks second. This is where Parkersburg's public game happens: the league nights, the weekend groups without a membership anywhere, the kids learning the game an easy drive from home. The golf is municipal in spirit and scale, a working course for a working city, and its value to the town is measured in rounds rather than reputation.

There is a dignity in that arrangement that rankings understate. The club course is where Parkersburg's best players test themselves, but Worthington is where Parkersburg's golfers are made: first sets of clubs, first broken eighty, first round with a parent who learned on the same fairways. A city that keeps a public course in the middle of town, priced for the people who live there, is making a statement about who golf belongs to, and Parkersburg has kept making it.

The concession is the comparison it cannot win. Against a private club founded in 1902, Worthington's architecture and conditioning sit where public golf in a small Ohio Valley city sits, and a ranking that scores the golf first has to place it second.

Second in ranking, first in access, and the course that would be missed by more golfers if it closed. Parkersburg's golf story is a short one: an old club on the river side of town and a public course holding the everyday game, and on an October evening with the Ohio running low and slow past Vienna, short stories suit the place.