Taconic began in 1896 with three tomato cans. That year, William Howard Doughty, James M. Ide, and Edward C. Gale got permission from Williams College to sink them into pastureland beside what is now the 18th fairway, and golf took root in the Purple Valley. The layout grew to seven holes that same season — today's 17th survives from that expansion, making it one of the oldest holes in continuous play in New England — and to a proper nine by 1897.

The course you play now arrived in 1927, when the club commissioned the Boston firm of Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek to build a full eighteen. Stiles and Van Kleek were masters of fitting golf to New England ground, and at Taconic they barely disturbed it: the holes fan out through the trees and roll with the valley floor, framed on every side by the Taconic Range and the Berkshires. In 2009, Gil Hanse's restoration widened fairways, expanded greens, and cleared trees to bring their design back into full view.

For a small college course, Taconic has a national resume. The USGA brought the U.S. Junior Amateur here in 1956 — the week a 16-year-old Jack Nicklaus made a hole-in-one on the 14th in a practice round, an ace still commemorated at the tee — then the U.S. Women's Amateur in 1963, won by the great Anne Quast Sander, and the U.S. Senior Amateur in 1996.

Taconic remains what it has been for more than a century: the home course of Williams College, semi-private but welcoming, routinely named among the finest campus courses in America. Students walk it at dusk, leaf-peepers time their rounds to October, and every golfer who visits leaves telling the same happy lie — that they nearly matched Nicklaus at the 14th.

Museum-quality Taconic Golf Club map art, traced from real course data — every green, bunker, and Berkshire fairway of the Stiles & Van Kleek classic. Nicklaus's famous ace included in the story. Four designs, six sizes, or personalized with your round photo.

Course data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)