The USGA Museum is an educational institution dedicated to fostering an appreciation for the game of golf, its participants, and the Association. It serves as a caretaker and steward for the game’s history, supporting the Association’s role in ensuring the game’s future.

By collecting, preserving, and interpreting the historical developments of the game in the United States, with an emphasis on the Association and its championships, the Museum promotes a greater understanding of golf’s cultural significance for a worldwide audience.

Celebrating the Game’s History

The origins of the USGA Museum can be traced to 1935, when George Blossom, a member of the USGA’s Executive Committee, first proposed the creation of a collection of historical golf artifacts. One year later, in an effort to formalize the Museum, the USGA Museum and Library Committee was created with the primary function of collecting historically significant artifacts and books. The first significant donation to the Museum—Bob Jones’ legendary putter, Calamity Jane II—followed in 1938.

For the first 16 years of its existence, the Museum had no formal home and artifacts were displayed throughout the USGA offices in New York. In 1951, when the Association purchased the property at 40 East 38th Street in New York City, the first dedicated display space for the collections was created and the Museum was formally opened. Since 1972, our facility in Far Hills, N.J., has provided public exhibition galleries, staff offices and collections storage for the Museum.

For most of our institutional history, significant resources were devoted to the traditional museum functions. Through our central museum facilities in New York and Far Hills, and more recently through our extensive traveling exhibition programs, the primary activities of the Museum were to collect and display artifacts.

Education is the Key

In recent decades, the broader community of museums has come to recognize that exhibition and display of collections, though central to their mission and identity, should not alone define the role of the museum. Museums have come to embrace enthusiastically their role as educational institutions and as centers for research and scholarship. In the first decade of the 21st century, museums are no longer judged on the strength of their collections, but upon their ability to communicate, to generate and disseminate information, and to make a positive impact in the lives of their communities.

To properly serve the USGA and its mission, the USGA Museum now dedicates extensive resources to its educational responsibilities. It is our firm belief that our energies can and must be employed in support of the game and for the good of all golfers. To this end, we have developed a variety of programs to disseminate information, scholarship, and educational programming to a broad and diverse audience.

Although we have made considerable progress in developing an active educational program at the USGA Museum, we feel that it is our obligation to aggressively pursue ways to expand the geographic reach of our education programs. As we look to the future, we will seek to employ the very best methods and the latest technology that will allow us to bring our collections, our knowledge, and our passion for the game to classrooms, clubhouses, or homes throughout the country.