Long before anyone thought of golf in Hatchville, a Massachusetts agriculturist named Wilfred Wheeler was worried about farmland. In the early twentieth century he watched it slipping away across the state, and on Cape Cod in particular, and he devised a plan. The Coonamessett Ranch Company would start a modern dairy and truck farm where farmers could be trained. Between 1916 and 1920 the ranch gathered up more than 14,000 acres of Massachusetts land, and in return Wheeler was given 350 of them to farm, to produce and can dairy goods for distribution. By 1924 that contract had run out. The ranch was left holding 350 acres above Coonamessett Pond, and it decided to build something grander than a farm. What rose there was an upscale resort overlooking the water, with an airstrip, tennis courts, a polo field, and beach cabanas. And by 1929 there was a golf course, laid out by Devereux Emmet and his design partner, Alfred Tull. The ground was hilly and sandy-soiled, and they draped a wonderfully strategic course over it, a true Golden Age gem set into the rolling sand above the pond. The course first carried the name Coonamessett Country Club, borrowed from the nearby Coonamessett Inn. The word is Wampanoag, and it means "Long Fish, White Pine Place." That is a lovely thing to have folded into a golf club's identity, a name that speaks of water and trees. The names kept changing after that. There was a two-year stretch as the Treadway Inn, then two decades, from 1957 to 1977, as Clauson's Inn and Country Club. At that point it finally became Cape Cod Country Club, a name that claims the whole peninsula. The resort's history is written into the practice ground in a way few clubs can match. In 1949 a theater was built as part of the Coonamessett Resort, and the Falmouth Playhouse became a popular Cape attraction. It burned down in 1994, and the owners were suspected of arson. Today a portion of the building serves as the embankment for a perched practice chipping green. A turf mat lets golfers practice high-lofted wedges over a ten-foot wall that remains from the theater. Every flop shot clears a ruin. It is hard to think of a more fitting monument to a summer playhouse than a place where people still perform, one lob at a time. The tension at Cape Cod Country Club is no longer about what the architects intended. It is about whether the ground will be golf at all. In 2021 the owner, David Friel, wanted to sell, calling the course a sunk cost and claiming that golf was in decline. Amp Energy, a renewable energy company, became a willing buyer of the 140-acre property, with plans for a large solar farm. In 2022 the Falmouth town council voted in favor of the solar plans. Now the course waits at a standstill, its owners awaiting approval from the Cape Cod Commission. If the commission approves, the course will likely be lost forever. There is a strange symmetry in it. This land began with a man worried about keeping it as farmland, became a playground, and may now become a different kind of farm, one that harvests sunlight. Until that is settled, Emmet and Tull's hills still roll above Coonamessett Pond, long fish and white pine still live in the old name, and the theater wall still stands for anyone who wants to loft a ball over it.