Olympia Fields Country Club

Olympia Fields Country Club, chartered in 1915 by a group of investors led by Charles Beach, is one of Illinois's most significant golf venues by tournament pedigree: its two 18-hole courses (North and South) have hosted the U.S. Open (1928, 2003), the PGA Championship (1925, 1961, 1997), and the BMW Championship, among other major professional and amateur events. What sets Olympia Fields apart from Illinois's other championship-pedigree clubs for this platform's purposes, however, is not the tournament history alone but a genuinely unusual, documented residential-founding relationship: Charles Beach personally organized the effort to incorporate the residential areas growing up around the club as a municipality, and in 1927 the Village of Olympia Fields was formally created with Beach as its first village president. The village's earliest subdivisions followed a Greek theme in their street names (Athens, Hellenic, Parthenon, Corinth, Sparta), directly tied to the club's own founding-era identity.

This is meaningfully different from a club that a town simply grew up near organically -- the club's own founder created the surrounding municipal government. That said, research in this pass could not confirm that any specific present-day neighborhood, including the Graymoor section referenced in the village's own resident handbook, is formally bundled to club membership as a condition of purchase; Graymoor appears to have its own distinct provisions as a village neighborhood, not a membership-linked development. The club today remains private and invitation-only, with membership access entirely separate from village residency -- a homebuyer in Olympia Fields the village does not thereby gain any golf privileges at Olympia Fields Country Club.