Grindstone Neck Golf Course

Grindstone Neck Golf Course was founded in 1891 as part of a planned summer colony on the Grindstone Neck peninsula at Winter Harbor, on Maine's Downeast coast. In 1889 the Gouldsboro Land Improvement Company bought about 300 acres of farmland there, and Nathan Franklin Barrett designed a subdivision of 198 cottage lots of at least an acre each; within the first year nearly thirty cottages, many in the Shingle style, were built or underway. During the early 1890s the colony added an oceanfront clubhouse and casino, the three-story Grindstone Inn, a Shingle-style Episcopal church, and a golf course credited to Alex Findlay. The colony never reached its full potential, and the inn burned in 1956, but the clubhouse, church, and golf course survive largely intact. Today the nine-hole course remains one of the oldest in Maine, playing along the water at the edge of the peninsula, a rare surviving piece of the Gilded Age summer resort era.