Olympia Fields Country Club

Founded in 1915, by 1925 the club boasted four 18-hole courses and the largest private clubhouse in the world with an 80-foot, four faced clock tower visible to golfers from all four first tees. The grandeur of Olympia Fields was remarkable even to Herbert Warren Wind, America's leading golf historian, who, in his landmark work, the Story of American Golf, marveled at this unparalleled expression of the spirit of the Golden Age. Bigger and better went up all over the country. But Olympia Fields was the daddy of them all. Conceived in 1914, this gargantuan retreat in the woods below Chicago was at length completed in 1925. "The world's largest private golf club" was the first to offer its members seventy-two holes of golf. (Over a thousand caddies were enrolled.) The clubhouse was a liberal translation of English Tudor with a dining room that seated eight hundred, a cafe seating six hundred, only one outdoor dancing pavilion but five hundred feet of veranda. The club operated its own ice-making plant and its own hospital. One hundred families owned cottages in the dells of the club's 692 acres. Through some oversight, Olympia Fields never made provisions for its own college and major league baseball team, but it was possible to live your life out there if your wants were not exotic.