There are clubhouses and there are museums, but the clubhouse at storied Inverness Club is both. Club members don’t simply talk about golf lore and golf history. They live, eat, shower, and dress in the midst of it. Few clubs anywhere are prouder of their past, or are more willing to share it than is Inverness Club whose past includes eight major national championships.
The clubhouse itself is a central piece of Inverness history. The current structure, of course, is not the original, nor even the second. The first clubhouse was built in 1903 at a cost of $5,400. It burned in 1911. The second clubhouse, quite opulent for its time with a circular wing, was built in 1912, at a cost of $23,600. November 24, 1918, this too burned.
The exact locations of the first two clubhouses are unknown. Some Club historians report that the current clubhouse was built “over the ashes” of its predecessors, but that may be more metaphorical than historical.
Board minutes of a meeting after the 1918 fire that destroyed the second structure indicate that members were asked to vote on a location for the new clubhouse. Some 285 votes were received with 220 voting for “the Grove site,” 50 for the “present location,” and 15 expressing no preference.
Information about the second clubhouse is one of the few gaps in the Club’s otherwise well-documented history, perhaps because the building existed for such a short time. Few pictures of the structure survive, and little was ever written of the structure that was the Club’s home for less than seven full years beginning in 1912. Pictures show a luxurious structure with a dramatic, curved wing with continuous tall windows that was, most likely, the dining room, ballroom, or both. The front of the clubhouse was a modest, farmhouse-like section with a large porch, but the rear wing, which faced the golf course, was a substantial three-story facility. The sprawling building appears in pictures to have shingle-type wooden siding, an architectural style still evident in many clubhouses along the eastern seaboard that date from the same era.
The current building was built in 1919-1920 at a cost of $160,000. It is reminiscent of English manor architecture. The clubhouse is an archive of mementoes from four United States Open tournaments, one U.S. Senior Open, two PGA Championships, and one U.S. Amateur, and from such legends as club professional Byron Nelson, course designer Donald Ross, and Club member Frank Stranahan, the world's premier amateur golfer in the mid-20th Century.