Cantigny: An Editor’s Estate Still Open to the Public

Wheaton’s west side still holds a country place. Cantigny is the estate Robert R. McCormick left as a public trust: First Division Museum, gardens, and a golf club that Golf Digest named America’s best new public course when the first eighteen opened in 1989. The golf sits at 27W270 Mack Road as three nines—Woodside, Hillside, Lakeside—that combine into a full day on rolling ground, water, and trees that belong to an editor’s lawn rather than to a developer’s plat. From the Loop the drive is about forty-five minutes west on the Eisenhower and out through the DuPage towns.

McCormick ran the Chicago Tribune and served in the First Division in France. He named the estate after the village of Cantigny. The house and the museum tell that story. The golf course was the later gift: a public club on private-looking land so a traveling player could walk ground that was never supposed to be a subdivision. Traditional comfort here is the estate day—trees, a proper shop, a lunch that looks out on the same lawn.

The terrain is the point of the Diamond. Woodside and Hillside move through timber and elevation the prairie rarely offers. Lakeside brings water into the shot. None of the nines is a joke. Combined they play as a serious eighteen or a twenty-seven-hole afternoon. Greens are defended. Forced carries appear when you get greedy. The slope on the stronger combinations will humble a man who believed suburban golf was short. Play the tees that match the swing. The beauty is the corridor of oak and the long view across McCormick’s grass. It is serene in the exact sense a golf course can be: maintained, quiet, older than the houses down the road.

May into June and September into early October are the handsome weeks. The gardens on the estate peak in the same seasons. July humidity sits on the low ground near the water. Shoulder season after a wet spring can soften the fairways. The shop will tell you when the nines were punched.

The clubhouse is a full public facility: shop, range, restaurant, rooms for an outing. It does not pretend to be a cottage. It does pretend, successfully, that you are on an estate. Book the combination you want. Walk if the legs and the heat allow; the hills argue for a cart on a warm day. After the round the museum and the gardens are on the same property. That is the rare second act in Chicago golf.

Nearby, downtown Wheaton and Glen Ellyn hold walkable streets and shops. Cantigny Park’s grounds are the attraction that is already here. Fermilab’s prairie sits farther west. The drive home on I-88 is the ordinary tax.

The limitations are geography and the split nines. You are not downtown. Peak fees have risen with the rest of the premium public tier. A single eighteen with one continuous story, like Dubsdread, will feel more like a tournament. Cantigny will feel more like a place. Winter closes the grass. The museum stays.

Cantigny is a Citywide Spotlight Diamond Destination because an American estate still sells a tee time. Choosing these nines over a plain west-suburban municipal is a choice for McCormick’s ground, for timber and water that were planted as a gift, and for the older amenity of a day that looks like the country. The comfort is traditional—an estate road, a collar, a lunch on the property—and the benefit is leaving Wheaton having played land that was never supposed to be ordinary.