Copake Country Club

Origins

The course traces back to Camp Copake, a lakeside resort that brothers Sam and Sidney Zasuly built for New York City vacationers in the years after World War I. The Zasulys picked a site on high ground above Copake Lake, in the Columbia County foothills of the Berkshires, and hired Devereux Emmet to lay out a golf course for their guests. Emmet, already an established Golden Age architect with credits including Congressional Country Club's Blue Course and a hand in the design committee for the National Golf Links of America, began construction in 1921 and the course opened for play in 1922.

Design Philosophy

Emmet built the course around the property's natural elevation changes rather than imposing artificial features on it. Tees and greens sit on high points, creating valleys to cross on approach, and the routing uses only a small number of fairway bunkers, leaning instead on canted, undulating greens with false fronts and false sides to defend par. Several holes, including a pair of short par-5s, invite aggressive play while punishing anyone who misses the correct angle.

Stone walls left over from the property's earlier use as farmland still cross a few fairways, a detail typical of the "found terrain" approach many Golden Age architects favored.

Development

Like many modest Golden Age courses, Copake went through a long stretch of decline, with tree growth crowding out the original open sightlines and bunkers losing their shape. Around 2008, new ownership commissioned architects Mark Fine and Scott Witter to lead a multi-year restoration. Their work, completed by roughly 2011, reshaped and re-edged bunkers, pushed several greens back out to their original boundaries, removed encroaching trees to reopen playing corridors, and eliminated contour mowing patterns that had crept in over the decades.

Recognition

Copake has drawn attention within golf-architecture circles as an under-the-radar Emmet design that survived largely intact, and the 2008-2011 restoration was documented in golf course industry trade press as the club approached its 100th anniversary in 2022.

Today

The club now operates as a daily-fee public course open to outside play, alongside The Greens restaurant and a seasonal rate schedule that varies by day of week, time of day, and month. It continues to host member events and outside group outings rather than national championships.