Oconomowoc Golf Club

Set just north of downtown Oconomowoc on Brown Street, Oconomowoc Golf Club occupies glacier-shaped ground of ridges and kettles that still govern how the ball moves across the site. Today the club is a private, golf-centric operation with a limited regular membership and no tee times, a practice range and short-game areas, and a hilltop clubhouse completed in 2002 overlooking the closing green. The course plays to a par 70 across 18 holes, with small, elevated targets and diagonally-set bunkers asking players to position tee shots for full-carry approaches—particularly where the fairways run off toward swales or ravines. The club stages in-house competitions and regularly hosts Wisconsin State Golf Association events; the routing remains a true walk, with brief green-to-tee connections. Conditioning centers on bentgrass fairways reseeded in 2008, and recent restoration work has thinned trees, recaptured wind and light, and returned a number of Ross-era hazards. Visitors encounter a compact, strategic course that uses short par fives and a demanding set of par threes—each oriented to a different wind—to extract mistakes, with the uphill thirteenth and the false-fronted eighteenth offering the purest expression of how this ground was first set up for golf in the 1910s.