# The Best Golf Courses in Wolfeboro

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-wolfeboro-nh/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New Hampshire


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wolfeboro calls itself America's oldest summer resort town, and for once the claim has the paperwork of age behind the feeling. Families have been coming to the eastern shore of Lake Winnipesaukee for their summers since before golf was part of the deal, and the golf, when it came, arrived in the game's older accent: a Ross era semi-private in town and a private course attributed to Donald Ross himself over in New Durham. Two courses. That is the whole bench, and we will not pretend it is five.

A two course ranking lives or dies on the argument between them, and here the argument is a good one. One course you can actually play. One course carrying the bigger name behind a private gate in the next town over. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in a summer town where most readers arrive as visitors, access is not a tiebreaker. It is close to the main event.

## 1Kingswood Golf Club

Kingswood takes No. 1 on the combined weight of era, place, and the simple fact that a visitor to Wolfeboro can get on it. It is a Ross era semi-private, which places its bones in the period when New England golf design was at its most confident: walkable routings, greens set into the land rather than poured on top of it, and a course that expects you to think in angles rather than carry distances. Ross era is not the same as a Ross original, and we will not upgrade it into one. But courses built in that idiom, in that decade, in this region, tend to age better than almost anything built since, and Kingswood's longevity in a small town is itself an argument.

The setting does the rest. Wolfeboro in summer is lake light, white houses, boats at the dock, and a main street that still works. Golf that belongs to a town like that, rather than being helicoptered in by a developer, has a coherence money struggles to buy. Kingswood is the town's course in the way the town has always had a course: semi-private, member rooted, open enough at the edges for the summer population that keeps Wolfeboro alive.

The concession is real. If the private course across the line in New Durham is everything its attribution promises, then on pure design ceiling Kingswood may be second. A semi-private in a seasonal town also fights the calendar: a short season, summer traffic compressed into a few weeks, conditioning that peaks when the town is fullest and the tee sheet is least forgiving.

It still wins. A ranking for a town should reward the course that defines golf in that town for members and visitors alike, and that is Kingswood. The Ross era bones are the evidence. The open door is the verdict on top of it.

## 2Lake Winnipesaukee Golf Club (New Durham)

The private neighbour carries the biggest two words in New England golf: Donald Ross, with an asterisk the size of a lake. The record describes the course as Ross attributed, and attributed is a word that should slow everyone down. Attribution means the name travels with the course without the full documentary proof that settles arguments. Plenty of genuine Ross work carries murky paperwork, and plenty of courses have borrowed the name over the years. The honest position is that the design DNA is said to be his, the course is private, and very few of the golfers who debate it have actually walked it.

What is not in doubt is the proposition: a private club in New Durham, drawing its membership from the lake's summer wealth, with no need to sell tee times to strangers and every incentive to keep the course exactly as its members like it. Private golf at that level, on Lakes Region land, with a Ross story attached, is a serious golf course by any accounting. If we scored design reputation alone, it might well take this list.

Two things hold it at No. 2. The first is the attribution hedge, because this site does not hand out No. 1 on a name that arrives with a qualifier. The second is access in its starkest form: for nearly everyone who summers in Wolfeboro, this course might as well be on the far side of the lake. Private golf is allowed to be private. A town ranking is allowed to notice.

So Wolfeboro ends with a split decision the town itself would recognise. The course you will play is the course we rank first, and the course you will hear about at the dock, behind its gate in New Durham, finishes a respectful second. The lake does not care either way. It just goes on being the reason both of them exist.

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