The clubhouse at Medinah Country Club in Medinah, Illinois, turns 100 on Saturday of Presidents Cup week
Medinah Country Club's clubhouse in Medinah, Illinois, marks its formal opening centennial on Saturday, September 26, 1926's anniversary day, during Presidents Cup week on Course No. 3.
The Moorish Revival house at Medinah Country Club in Medinah, Illinois, marks its formal opening centennial on Saturday, September 26, 2026. That day falls in the middle of Presidents Cup week on Course No. 3 at the same club.
The dates line up with unusual neatness. Medinah Country Club's clubhouse opened on September 26, 1926. Saturday is that anniversary, and it falls in the middle of the 2026 Presidents Cup, with competition running September 24 through 27 on Course No. 3. The golf is on the championship routing. The building is the landmark house on the same property, the same mass that has announced the club since Calvin Coolidge was in office.
Shriners from Chicago's Medinah Temple founded the club in 1924 on 640 acres of former prairie. They laid the clubhouse cornerstone that November and hired charter member Richard G. Schmid, who had already given them the Medinah Temple on Wabash Avenue. Schmid mixed Byzantine, Oriental, Louis XIV, and Italian influences under a dome modeled after the mosques of Medina, Saudi Arabia, the club's namesake city. Course No. 1 opened in 1925, Course No. 2 in 1926, Course No. 3 in 1928, all by Tom Bendelow. The house itself was dedicated on September 26, 1926, with more than 1,500 guests inside.
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What they walked into is now counted at about 120,000 square feet. The first room still does the work: a sixty-foot rotunda with a hand-painted mosaic ceiling by fellow member Gustav A. Brand, who had painted the Chicago temple as well. The grand ballroom carries murals at the same scale. Third-floor rooms were built as a hotel for visiting Shriners and later converted to meeting space in a 1997 renovation by Williams Architects that also restored the rotunda paint. A fuller walk through those rooms is in the Medinah clubhouse tour.
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Course No. 3 is the reason television is here. It has already held three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, and the 2012 Ryder Cup. Hale Irwin's winning putt in 1990 and Tiger Woods's PGA finishes in 1999 and 2006 all closed on that course, not in the rotunda. The club's own history is the clean record of how the three Bendelow courses and the Schmid house were sequenced. This week the matches stay on Course No. 3 while the century-old house remains the social and hospitality center of the same campus.
That split is the point of the weekend. Saturday is the double session of the Presidents Cup, and it is also the day the house turns 100. The building matters this week because a centennial clubhouse is framing the cup: the same silhouette at the end of the drive is the cutaway between matches, a hundred-year-old house standing while the cup is decided on the course it was built to face.
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