Nation's first Black-owned country club in New Jersey receives national preservation grant
SCOTCH PLAINS – A group whose mission is to preserve the township's Shady Rest Country Club has received a $75,000 grant to help preserve the Jerusalem Road facility as a Black heritage site.
The Preserve Shady Rest Committee was awarded the grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, officials announced.
The money will be used to support a master plan to guide preservation and interpretation activities on the property.
The Shady Rest Country Club, established in 1921, was the first Black-owned and operated country club in the United States.
The club hosted the first American-born professional golfer, John Shippen Jr., a Black man born in 1879 whose father was born into slavery.
Black luminaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois and performers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Cab Calloway, Earl Hines, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday also frequented the club.
Althea Gibson, the first Black woman to win Wimbledon and the first Black woman to join the Ladies Professional Golfers Association, played tennis and golf at the Shady Rest.
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The mission of the Preserve Shady Rest Committee, formed in 2013, is to make Scotch Plains and other New Jersey residents aware of the historic significance of the nine-hole golf course.
The organization hopes to preserve and restore the Shady Rest Clubhouse and to create a multi-purpose center and museum to display memorabilia, photographs, artifacts and oral stories .
The committee has attended township council meetings to advocate improvements to the clubhouse. The group has also petitioned the New Jersey Historical Society to recognize the facility as a state landmark and has hosted educational events.
The township acquired the facility through a tax lien foreclosure in 1938 and maintained it until 1964 when it took over operations. The township renamed it Scotch Hills Country Club and opened it to the public.
In 2021, the golf course was renamed to Shady Rest Country Club. The Shady Rest clubhouse and golf course was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places in July 2022.
The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, announced $3 million in grants protect and preserve 30 sites representing Black history. With more than $140 million raised since its founding in 2017, the Action Fund is the largest resource dedicated to the preservation of African American historic places.
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This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Nation's first Black-owned country club in NJ gets heritage grant
