For context, here's an excerpt newsletter I wrote to the membership:
Beyond merely new faces, the most obvious change will be the incorporation of a new logo which features our correct date of establishment: 1895. Last summer, I conducted archival research aimed at discovering who had designed the course. While I was unable discover the architect (though I can conclusively say it was not Alex Ternyei who is often credited), I stumbled across a missing link which confirmed that our club has been in continuous existence since 1895.
It had widely been believed that the club we now know as Twin Brooks had originally been founded as the 9-hole “Park Golf Club” in Plainfield in 1895. However, at the end of 1915, the bustling Park Golf Club inexplicably vanished from the records. It appeared history had forgotten what had happened to the club. It was known that many of the members of Park Golf Club comprised the core of Twin Brooks’ original membership, but no one knew what happened in the interim between Park’s 1915 closing and Twin Brooks’ 1926 “founding.”
My research discovered that Park Golf Club did not fold in 1915, but instead merely relocated. The club moved from its original location in Plainfield to a new 9-hole course near what is today the intersection of Watchung Ave. and Rt. 22 in North Plainfield. Not coincidentally, the course opened in 1916 (one year after Park Golf Club’s disappearance), but renamed itself “Hydewood Golf Club,” a key discovery. Hydewood was the missing link.
By comparing contemporary newspaper articles which contained lists of officers and published results from weekly tournaments, it soon became clear that Park Golf Club had become Hydewood. This was confirmed by at July 30, 1927 New York Times article about the opening of our current golf course which stated that, “Although Hydewood has been in operation since 1897 (in actuality, 1895) it is virtually a new country club as it has moved from within the (Plainfield) city limits to about three miles out.” The same officers, the same members, the same club. Confusion regularly stemmed from newspapers’ struggles to keep track of the frequent name changes and relocations. Stories often mistook what was one club for multiple.
In 1926, the membership of Hydewood moved to our current facility here in Watchung. Although beginning existence as Hydewood, the members yet again changed the club’s name, this time to “Watchung Valley Country Club.” A lengthy article in the February 1929 edition of Golf Illustrated showed plans for a new clubhouse, which was to be built in the style of a medieval castle. The Great Depression intervened later that year and the plans for a moat and drawbridge were scrapped. The Watchung Valley name would be used for most of the 1930’s, with a gradual transition to “Twin Brooks Country Club” complete by 1945.
We are proud to be able to trace our heritage back without interruption to 1895 and through four names, we’re still one club.