09/08/2026
Amazing history of how Clinton Country Club originated! 💚⛳️
The Clinton Country Club began life as a cow pasture. Not near one. On one.
We know the story because one of the men who was there wrote it down. In March 1970, for the club's fiftieth anniversary, Haysler Poague set his memories on paper. He warned that he was working "largely on memory," fifty years on, and that the earliest records were long lost.
Just after the First World War, Poague wrote that he and John B. Owen came home to Clinton, two young lawyers who had taken up golf in college. There wasn’t a course anywhere nearby, so they decided to build their own. Owen's cow pasture wasn’t far from town, and the cows had already done half the work for them: they had cropped the grass short and packed the ground flat where the cows liked to stand in the shade. The two men sank a tin can in a bare patch of dirt under a big elm tree, teed off up the slope, and promptly called it a one-hole golf course.
They did not stay a twosome for long. Jack Dysart and Fred Livingston joined in, and as far as Poague could recall, those four were the only men in Clinton who had ever swung a club. So, they rounded up twenty-odd men willing to put in twenty-five dollars apiece, no small sum in those days, and formed a real club.
Making a real course was rough work. To build greens, they stripped the sod and hauled in sand. And here is the mistake Poague swore outlived them all. Laying out the third green, he and Owen meant to mark a circle thirty feet across. Without thinking, they anchored the tape at the center stake and walked it clear around, drawing a circle sixty feet across, twice what they meant. Even in 1970, Poague wrote, it was still the largest green on the course. It got that way because two lawyers measured wrong and never noticed until the sod was cut.
The town was not impressed. Golf, Poague remembered, then meant wearing a costume of sorts: knickers that bagged and buckled below the knee, a checked cap with a pom-pom on top, and a sweater with a high rolled collar. Just picture the sight of them, grown men marching out to a cow lot dressed like that. Their neighbors gave it a name. The pasture pool boys. Pool meaning billiards: the town was saying golf was just billiards played out in a field, cows and all. Still, Poague and his friends ignored the ridicule and kept playing.
And it worked. They cleared brush on weekends they called "Buck Brush Days." Not a dollar and not a fella named Buck, but rather named after the type of brush that covered the field. Each weekend, the players became groundsmen and did the hard work of clearing the land. To make the task easier, they bought a stripped-down truck to pull a mower. In April 1921, the local paper printed a drawing of the new nine-hole course. The town that had laughed was now looking at the course printed in their local newspaper.
The club those men started is still going, a century on. But you would not find that oversized green there today: in 1992 the members built a new eighteen-hole course northeast of town, and the old cow-pasture links passed into memory.
There's more to Poague's story: the caddies, the swimming pool, the clubhouse, one accident nobody could unsee or forget. Those are stories for another day, though. While much of the story lives his 1970 account; the rest waits in records not yet dug through.
So, we will close for now and come back to it another day, for what, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
More Henry County history is waiting at hcmomuseum.org/articles.
