Rockledge Country Club: from the 1924 Poinsett Golf and Country Club to the Florida Historic Golf Trail

Rockledge Country Club started life in 1924 as the Poinsett Golf and Country Club. According to the Florida Department of State, the club was organized that year and chartered a few months later, and it hired George Wilson as its golf professional, who laid out and built the course. Nine holes were open for play, unofficially, by December 1924, and the official opening came in early 1925. The course became 18 holes in January 1936, after federal relief crews built the back nine.

A boom-year club

1924 and 1925 were the peak of Florida’s land boom, and in Rockledge the National Park Service’s history of the town describes a population climbing past 600, every room full in season, new subdivisions blurring the line with Cocoa, and the town reincorporating as a city in April 1925. A golf club fit that moment. It opened its nine holes about a year before the boom began to fail in 1926.

The relief-labor back nine

The second nine came out of the Depression. In 1934, the Department of State says, the city received 12,000 man-hours of labor from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to build nine more holes, and a year later another 3,600 hours to finish the job. The expanded 18-hole course opened for play in January 1936.

On the trail

In 2022 the Florida Department of State named Rockledge Country Club the newest partner course on the Florida Historic Golf Trail, its list of historic golf courses around the state that the public can still play. The club, now under the Rockledge Country Club name, traces its founding to the early 1900s in its own telling; the state’s history begins with the Poinsett club of 1924.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon