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The St. Andrews Golf Club was started in 1894 by several summer residents and consisted of a 9-hole pitch and putt directly in front of the Algonquin Hotel. Immediately popular with guests, the next year a nine-hole course was laid out on St. Andrews Land Company property at Joe's Point. It was a small course, only about 2,000 yards in total. Members included Sir Leonard Tilley and Sir William Van Horne.In the early days the course was quite primitive. Only the greens were mowed. The caddy awaited the drive down the fairway; marked the ball location with a flag-tipped staff and moved farther down to await the next shot. Cows still browsed the links. The Club made its own sticks and balls.
The Land Company determined to make golf a leading attraction of the Algonquin in 1896. A Boston artist was hired to make sketched of Joe's Point and surroundings for a pamplet on the course. Robert Gardiner, a founding member of both the Land Company and Golf Course, donated a Clubhouse about 36 feet square with a covered verandah along the front. It had a lady's and gentlemen's compartment, each with fireplace, toilet room and lockers. This building still exists, near the present Clubhouse. It is one of the oldest in Canada and was perhaps, along with the Golf Club itself, perhaps the first in the Maritimes.
In 1897 the Land Company laid out an additional 9 holes and claimed to have the only 18-hole golf course connected with a summer hotel in Canada.
When the original Clubhouse proved to be too small to handle increased traffic over the course, a new one was built on Cedar Lane. This building was not thought to have been well done, and also was too far from the Algonquin, so in 1913 a new clubhouse, on the old Poor House Farm property sold to the Hotel in that year, was built at the corner of Reid Avenue and Bayview Drive. A prized amenity of the new Clubhouse was toilets with running water from Chamcook Lake - this at a time when the Town itself was still drawing its water from wells. When this building was burned in 1972 a new clubhouse, resembling closely the old, was built on the same site. This clubhouse is no longer in use by the Golf Club.