Fairway Chronicles: PGA

The game got here first. In 1743, thirty-three years before the Declaration, a ship from Leith unloaded a curious consignment at Charleston: ninety-six golf clubs and four hundred and thirty-two balls, consigned to a merchant named David Deas. It is the earliest hard evidence of golf in America—an invoice. Then it vanished. Trade with Britain collapsed, the War of 1812 finished the job, and by the 1820s the game had gone almost without trace.