Golf on Nantucket: four courses, moor to sea
Key facts
- Four courses share the island: the Siasconset nine (1899), Sankaty Head (1921), the Nantucket Golf Club (1998), and public Miacomet.
- The Siasconset Golf Club is among the country's oldest courses still open to public play — preserved in 2012 when the Land Bank and the Sconset Trust bought it.
- Miacomet is the island's only public eighteen, owned by the Nantucket Land Bank, with capped memberships and resident cards protecting access.
- There are no gated golf-community subdivisions here — golf sits inside conservation landscape, and nearby houses trade on 'Sconset, Tom Nevers, and Miacomet addresses, not fairway frontage.
Golf, the island way
Golf arrived on Nantucket in the 1890s and never left — but it grew the island's way. No resort towers, no cul-de-sacs wrapped around cart paths. The courses sit inside moorland and above the ocean, two of them literally saved by conservation money, and houses nearby are 'Sconset and south-shore houses first, golf houses second.
That shape is why this page is a real-estate guide as much as a golf tour: where the courses are is where a particular kind of buyer looks.
The nine that started it
The Siasconset Golf Club has run its nine holes above the village since 1899, which makes it a time capsule: short, breezy, honest, and among the oldest courses in the country still open to public play. For most of its life it belonged to one island family; in 2012 the Nantucket Land Bank and the Sconset Trust bought the land to keep it from ever becoming house lots.
So a round there is also a walk through the island's whole land-use story — golf preserved as open space, open space preserved as golf. The conservation land guide tells that larger story.
The classic on the bluff
Sankaty Head Golf Club, founded in 1921 with golf underway the following summer, holds the high ground between 'Sconset and the lighthouse — fescue-lined fairways over the moors, the Atlantic filling every horizon. It is routinely counted among New England's finest courses, and its summer community runs deep; its caddie camp is one of the last of its kind in the country.
Membership is private and generational. For buyers, Sankaty is geography as much as golf: the addresses of 'Sconset, Quidnet, and the Polpis Road corridor share its landscape.
The modern private
The Nantucket Golf Club opened in 1998 on the moors between 'Sconset and Tom Nevers — a Rees Jones design that immediately joined the conversation among the region's elite courses, and a club famous for the discretion of its membership. Its profile is low by design; you could drive past on Milestone Road and never know it was there.
Its real-estate gravity is quiet too, but real: the east end's estate parcels — 'Sconset, Tom Nevers, the moors edges — carry the possibility of a life where both privates are minutes away.
The eighteen everyone can play
Miacomet Golf Course is the democratic answer: the island's only public eighteen, owned by the Nantucket Land Bank and run to stay accessible — memberships capped to keep tee times open, resident cards discounting play for year-rounders. It stretches through the south-shore plains with the ocean close enough to read the wind off it.
It is also the course that names a neighborhood. The Miacomet district — family-scaled houses minutes from tee one and the south-shore beaches — is the island's most literal golf-course address, without a gate in sight.
What golf means for a buyer
Match the course to the life. Public-golf regulars look at Miacomet, Surfside, and the mid-south shore, where the course is a bike ride and the beach is the second nine. Private-club families look east — 'Sconset village, Tom Nevers, Quidnet — where the two storied clubs anchor a summer world of their own. The 'Sconset guide and Tom Nevers guide cover those neighborhoods properly.
And everywhere on the island, the same happy fact: because golf here lives inside conservation land rather than development plans, the view from the fairway is protected the same way the view from your porch is.