Maplecrest Country Club

Origins

Maplecrest's back nine holes exist because a club golf professional went looking for land in the winter of 1960 and would not let a good site slip away. Don Perri identified the old Holderman farm on Hackett Road, just north of Goshen, took a 30-day option on the acreage, and had an agronomist check the ground before committing. He then brought in Amzie Miller and M.C. Cripe as his first financial partners.

The land was purchased and the club incorporated in April 1960, with additional acreage folded in from the neighboring Wills property. Even the club's name came from the membership: Emile Tassin, an employee at local manufacturer Penn Controls, won a naming contest with "Maplecrest." The first board — Perri, Miller, Cripe, Harold A. Schrock, Jay Ellinger, Don L. Yoder, Hubert Kirkdorfer Jr., Ray J. Troyer, and Dr. Carl Hostetler, with Frank E. Yoder serving as attorney and first board secretary — set the club's course from there.

Development

What today plays as the back nine opened first, on July 4, 1961, with 200 golfers teeing off in the club's inaugural round. No outside design firm was hired to route the holes; early members did much of the physical work themselves, clearing land and picking up rocks by hand to get the course playable. The second nine followed in March 1962, giving Maplecrest a complete 18 holes within two years of breaking ground.

Mickey Higgins succeeded Perri as head professional and held the job from 1963 through 1971 — years the club still refers to internally as its "polishing" period, when rough edges were smoothed out and hazards such as sand traps were added to sharpen the course that the founders had built.

Today

Maplecrest remains a member-run club rather than a resort or daily-fee operation. Its calendar still centers on traditions with deep roots, including The Invitational, a three-day four-ball match play event each June, alongside long-standing men's and women's leagues, a full slate of member scrambles, and a reciprocal arrangement that lets members play at other Indiana clubs. The apple tree preserved from the original farm remains a small physical link to the course the founders cleared by hand more than six decades ago.