Most centennial celebrations are really renovation announcements in disguise. A hundred years gives an institution the cover it needs to admit the old version wasn't quite working and unveil something updated, expanded, modernized. Wellshire Golf Course, which turns 100 this year, skipped that step entirely. The course Denver golfers are playing this fall is, by the club's own account, running on much the same layout it had when it opened in 1926. That's not an oversight. For the neighborhood that takes its name from this course, the fact that nothing changed is the actual story.
The Design Nobody's Touched Since 1924
In 1924, Scottish-born architect Donald Ross was hired to lay out a course on the old Skeel Family Farm. Ross is the same designer behind The Old Course at St. Andrews' American disciples, Pinehurst No. 2 and Oakmont among them, and Wellshire remains one of only three courses he ever designed in Colorado. It's the only public one he designed west of the Mississippi. His signature moves, natural-looking landforms, "turtle-back" greens that shed anything but a precisely struck approach, and bunkering meant to punish the wrong angle rather than the short shot, are still what you're playing against today.
Compare that to what happened across town at City Park Golf Course, which underwent a full renovation funded in part by a flood-control project: a rerouted layout, a new clubhouse, a redesigned kids' course. Wellshire took a different path. Bunkers have been added and removed over the decades, and natural growth has reshaped some fairways, but there's been no wholesale redesign since Ross drew the original routing. A sign near the first tee still carries some of that old-school bluntness for anyone stepping up to the tips: "If you can drive the ball 250 yards, hit from the back tees." Nobody rewrote that warning for a modern audience either.
The Three Rounds That Made It Famous
Wellshire's reputation wasn't built on its scorecard alone. In 1946 it hosted the 21st USGA Amateur Public Links Championship. Two years later, the Denver Open came through and Ben Hogan won his sixth consecutive tour victory here, with Dwight D. Eisenhower watching from the gallery, a streak that stood unmatched until Tiger Woods equaled it in 2000. The Open returned in 1958, and Arnold Palmer tied for third.
The most significant round played at Wellshire, though, wasn't won by a household name. In 1959, at age 23, Bill Wright became the first African American golfer to win a major national tournament when he took the 34th USGA Amateur Public Links here. That result happened on a course that had, just three decades earlier, been part of a private club built to exclude the very players it would later crown as champions. The club that opened in 1926 filed for bankruptcy by 1928; the City of Denver bought the property for $60,000 in 1936 and turned it into the municipal course it's been ever since. The arc from private exclusion to that 1959 win is, in its own way, as much a part of the centennial as the course architecture.
Two Weekends Already on the Calendar
The centennial isn't a single ceremonial afternoon. Denver Golf has built a summer-long slate of specials and events around it, and two dates matter most for anyone in Wellshire who wants to actually show up rather than just read about it.
| Event | Dates | Format | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wellshire Four-Ball | Sept. 5–7, 2026 (Labor Day weekend) | 3-day, 54-hole team event | The 83rd playing of Colorado's longest-running continuous golf tournament |
| Superintendent's Revenge | Oct. 10, 2026 | 18-hole, 4-player scramble | The course's own maintenance staff sets up the layout as difficult as they want for one day |
The Four-Ball's 83rd running this year puts its first playing at around 1944, which predates most of the neighborhood's midcentury homes and has now outlasted several eras of Denver golf entirely on its own terms. The Superintendent's Revenge is a newer, looser addition to the calendar, but it captures the same spirit: a course confident enough in its bones to let the people who maintain it turn the knobs for a day.
A few other names worth knowing if you're building out a fall golf calendar around Wellshire: the Gary Bowman Memorial Tournament runs Sept. 18, and the Bonanza League, part of Denver Golf's citywide league play, uses Wellshire as one of its regular stops through the season.
What There Is to Do If You're Not Playing
Not every Wellshire household has a golfer in it, and the course still shapes the neighborhood for everyone else. A few things worth knowing:
- Hogan's Alley, a free kids' course added in 2006 and named for Denver golf figure Dan Hogan, ties into First Tee of Denver youth programming and doesn't require a green fee.
- The High Line Canal Trail runs along the edge of the course and past Skeel Reservoir, giving non-golfers a walking or biking route through the same land Ross laid out a century ago.
- The original Tudor-style clubhouse, built the year after the first nine holes opened, still stands and now operates as the Wellshire Inn Events Center, handling banquets and private functions for anyone in the neighborhood who needs the space, not just golfers.
- Mamie D Eisenhower Park and its recreation center sit next door in University Hills, an easy add-on stop before or after a walk along the canal.
- For dinner afterward, the dining corridor along South Holly Street, anchored by longtime spots like Poppies Restaurant & Lounge and Nana's Dim Sum & Dumplings, remains the neighborhood's closest sit-down option without crossing University Boulevard.
On a clear day, the course's own literature notes you can see Red Rocks from the fairways. That kind of sightline doesn't come from a renovation. It comes from the fact that nobody rerouted the holes closer to the trees.
The Point of Turning 100 Without Changing
A hundred years is usually the moment an institution updates itself for a new audience. Wellshire's centennial argues the opposite case: that the reason a municipal golf course still matters to the neighborhood built around it is precisely because the greens still play the way Donald Ross designed them, the clubhouse is still the one built in 1927, and the tournament being played this Labor Day weekend is the same one that's run 82 times before it. The neighborhood didn't get a new landmark this year. It got confirmation that the old one is still exactly what it was.
If you're a Wellshire neighbor with questions about what any of this means for your street, or you're weighing a move into the neighborhood built around this course, reach out to Sherry Beindorff directly. She knows this stretch of South Denver the way a hundred-year-old golf course knows its own bunkers.
