Janesville Country Club

Janesville Country Club is a private golf and social club on West Memorial Drive in Janesville, Wisconsin, a city of Rock County in the south of the state. Wikipedia places it in the Town of Janesville, just outside the northwest city limits. The club’s own website describes an 18-hole course with rolling hills, elevated greens and tree-lined fairways, a driving range, a golf shop run by PGA professionals, a pool and dining rooms. The course is for members and their guests: the Janesville visitors bureau states that use of the club requires a membership or sponsorship by a member, and the club does not sell public tee times.

What sets it apart is age. Wikipedia and a 1994 article in The Grass Roots, the magazine of the Wisconsin Golf Course Superintendents Association, both date the club to 1894 and credit its founding to Alexander Galbraith, a Scot who brought clubs and balls back from Scotland to Janesville. The same magazine called it Wisconsin’s first country club. Wikipedia adds that it is the second golf club in the Midwest and the sixth in the United States; that ranking appears in several directories, but we found no independent historical record that confirms it, so treat it as the club’s tradition rather than a settled fact. A historical marker entry on the Clio website gives 1893 for the year Galbraith brought the game to the town, which suggests golf was played informally before the club was organized.

Sinnissippi, Galbraith and the first state amateur

The club did not always carry its present name. Articles in The Grass Roots published between 2009 and 2014, presenting the Wisconsin State Amateur each year, explain that the trophy of the championship, the Sinnissippi Cup, takes its name from the first State Amateur, played in 1901 at Sinnissippi Country Club, “which is now the Janesville Country Club”. Another article in the same magazine, on Maple Bluff Country Club, lists “Janesville Sinnissippi GC” among the ten charter clubs that formed the Wisconsin State Golf Association in 1901. Every winner of the state’s main amateur title therefore lifts a trophy named after this club.

Galbraith himself is better known in Wisconsin for horses than for golf. A property record of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which we could read only through search excerpts, says he imported Clydesdales from Scotland from 1880, later served as secretary and then president of the American Clydesdale Association, and that the land around the Ruger-Galbraith house was the site of Janesville’s original golf course. The 1994 Grass Roots article describes that first ground as what we “would nowadays charitably call a meadow” and reports that the club displayed, for its centennial, the original 15 clubs Galbraith brought from Scotland.

We found no published record of when the club moved to its present ground or of who shaped the current 18 holes. Golf directories credit the design to “Alexander Galbreath”, with the founder’s name spelled differently, and give 1894 as the year of construction. That attribution may simply repeat the founding story, and the club’s own pages do not name an architect. The club says only that its “championship layout dates back to the 1890s”.

A centennial and a record of events

The club marked its hundredth year in 1994 by hosting the Wisconsin State Golf Association State Amateur. A report in The Grass Roots that November says the club was hosting what reads, in the archived scan, as its fifth State Amateur; if that count is right, with 1901 it means at least three others in between that we could not date. The same issue counted more than four hundred members, 312 of them golf members, a figure that is now more than thirty years old. The magazine’s cover that year showed a hole from the course.

More recent events are on record too. The Janesville visitors bureau notes that the club hosted the Janesville LPGA Senior Pro-Am in 2019. The 2023 schedule of Wisconsin State Golf Association events, published in the Wisconsin.Golf yearbook, lists Janesville CC as the venue of the WSGA Women’s Amateur Championship that June; we read that schedule only in a search excerpt.

The card

The club does not publish a scorecard on its website, and the directories that do disagree in the detail. Several, including GolfLink and GolfPass in search excerpts, give a par of 72. GolfingRecord shows a card of 6,347 yards from the Blue tees, with a rating of 71.7 and a slope of 128, and 5,554 yards from the Red tees, rating 72.4 and slope 126. The golf app 18Birdies gives 6,374 yards with a rating of 72.1 and slope of 129. Other directories list 6,359 yards. The GolfingRecord card also gives the White tees the exact same yardages as the Blue on every hole, which is unlikely to be right, so we do not reproduce the White figures.

The hole-by-hole yardages on that card describe a course with four par 5s, four par 3s and ten par 4s, opening with a par 5 of 515 yards and closing with a par 4 of 331. They also show a set of short par 4s, several under 340 yards. Read these as indicative: no date is given and we could not compare them with a card from the club.

In short, this is a par 72 of about 6,350 yards from the back tees: modest by modern championship standards, which is what you would expect on a site laid out long before today’s equipment.

What it asks of you

The descriptions agree on one thing: the greens. The club speaks of “elevated greens”; a public review on 18Birdies says that “small elevated greens test your wedge play”, and the headline of a review on GolfPass, read in a search excerpt, calls them the “smallest greens around”. The 18Birdies community rates the greens as very fast and the course as very hard. Put together, it describes a course where length matters less than the approach: a green that sits above the fairway and offers little surface punishes an approach that is slightly short or off line, and leaves a delicate chip back up the slope.

The trees are the other theme. The club writes of tree-lined fairways and the same reviewer mentions very old trees that “test your long game”. On an old parkland course of this kind, that usually means the line off the tee matters more than raw distance, and that a ball in the trees costs a chip out sideways.

The hole the club’s own superintendent singled out in 1994 is the 15th, a par 5. In the Grass Roots article he described a narrow fairway on a long hole leading to a small green with no sand bunkers, and said that “tournaments are won and lost on the 15th”. The current directory card gives it 495 yards from the Blue tees. With no bunkers around the green, the defense is its size and the narrowness of the approach.

A directory listing also mentions bent grass greens, bluegrass fairways, water hazards and many bunkers; we could not confirm the water or the bunker count from the club or from an aerial description, so we leave them as a directory’s claim.

What golfers are saying

Public reviews of a private club are few, and most of those we found are star ratings without text. What follows sums up the recurring themes of the written reviews and app ratings on 18Birdies and of the GolfPass excerpts; nobody is named and nothing is counted.

On the plus side. The condition of the course comes up most often: reviewers describe it as in very good shape, and a directory summary speaks of well-groomed fairways and greens. The small, elevated greens are praised as a real test of the short game rather than a flaw. One written review singles out the staff and the food and drink after a round. The pace of play, rated very fast in the app’s aggregate, fits what the club advertises: no tee times, members walking on when they arrive.

On the minus side. We found almost no written criticism, which says more about how few public reviews exist than about the course. The cautions that do come out of the ratings are these: the app’s community rates the course very hard, high for a layout of this length, and the small, quick greens that members praise are the obvious trap for a visitor who does not know where to miss. The other limit is access: there is no way to book a round without a member, and the club publishes little about its course, its history or its card.

How to play it

Unless you are a member, you play here as a member’s guest, or through an event held at the club. The club runs, in its own words, “a full calendar of tournaments and member events for men, women, and couples”. Prospective members can download brochures for full golf, sport, social and dining memberships from the club’s membership page; the prices are not published on the page itself.

If you get the invitation, the advice the reviews point to is simple. Take an extra club into greens that sit above you and favor the side of the green that leaves an uphill chip. Spend some time on the putting green before the round, since the greens are described as quick. And on the 15th, think of the approach before the drive: the narrow fairway and the small, unbunkered green reward position rather than length.

The facilities

The club lists a complimentary driving range for members, on-site club storage, lessons from PGA professionals and a golf shop for equipment, apparel and fittings. The golf shop is open Tuesday through Sunday from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., according to the club; clubhouse hours are seasonal and the club asks you to call for current dining times. There is a full-size outdoor pool with a shallow toddler area, dining rooms, and indoor and outdoor event spaces for weddings, social gatherings and business events. The club does not publish details about cart rental or a dress code.

Getting there and when to go

The club’s address is 2615 West Memorial Drive, Janesville, on the northwest side of the city, and the phone number is (608) 755-7777. The club’s own pages give two different ZIP codes for the same address, so check with the office before relying on one for navigation. Free parking is listed by the visitors bureau.

The club does not publish its golf season, and the golf shop hours it lists leave out Mondays. If you are invited, ask your host when the course opens in spring and closes in the fall, and whether a tournament is scheduled the day you plan to play.

How this page was made

This page is based on the club’s website (home, golf, membership and contact pages, read on October 30, 2026), Wikipedia and Wikidata for the location and founding, the Wisconsin Golf Course Superintendents Association’s magazine The Grass Roots as archived by Michigan State University (July and November 1994 for the centennial, the 15th hole and the membership figures; 2009 to 2014 for the Sinnissippi Cup and the 1901 State Amateur; an article on Maple Bluff Country Club for the WSGA charter clubs), the Janesville visitors bureau for access and the 2019 LPGA Senior Pro-Am, and the golf directories GolfingRecord, 18Birdies, GolfLink and GolfPass for the card and the reviews. The OpenStreetMap outline of the course gives the map position.

Several sources could not be read directly: GolfPass and the Wisconsin Historical Society blocked automated requests, and the Wisconsin.Golf yearbook was only seen in a search excerpt. For those, we relied on the excerpts shown by search engines and say so above. Where sources disagree, as they do on the founding year, the spelling of the founder’s name, the yardage, the ratings and the ZIP code, we say so. We could not find the date the club moved to its present ground, the name of the architect of the current course, a record of renovations, an official scorecard or a published season, and we have not filled those gaps. The opinion section summarizes public reviews; we report recurring themes, not individual voices. Nobody from Panxis has played or visited this course, and this page is no substitute for a round.

Janesville Country Club has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say over its content. This page contains no commercial link and earns us no commission. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.

Other courses nearby

Closest to this one in our United States directory:

• Eagle Springs Golf Resort — 33 mi
• University Ridge Golf Course — 34 mi
• Erin Hills — 50 mi
• Blue Mound Golf & Country Club — 58 mi