cover image Oakhurst: The Birth and Rebirth of America's First Golf Course

Oakhurst: The Birth and Rebirth of America's First Golf Course

Paula DiPerna, Vikki Keller. Walker & Company, $23 (196pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-1371-1

At Oakhurst Links, a golf course in Sulphur Springs, W.Va., golfers are required to use hickory shafted clubs and sheep are allowed to graze on the grounds. That's because the course is America's oldest and it's still run according to 19th-century rules. In Oakhurst: The Birth and Rebirth of America's First Golf Course, golf magazine writer Paula DiPerna and Vikki Keller, who helps manage Oakhurst, tell the story of the course's initial creation by an American and four Scottish immigrants in 1884, when golf was still largely unknown in the U.S., and of its painstaking reconstruction over a century later. (May)