West of Chicago, on the flat Illinois ground at Wheaton, there is a golf course that was first at a remarkable number of things. Chicago Golf Club was founded in 1892 at Belmont, perhaps spurred by the great World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and a city that needed somewhere to send its visiting dignitaries to play. By 1894 or 1895 the club had moved to Wheaton. There Charles Blair Macdonald, the father of American golf course architecture, laid out what became the country's first 18-hole course. The firsts kept arriving. In 1897 Chicago became the first club outside the Northeast to host the US Open. It was the first club to employ bent grass greens. It stood among the five founding members of the American Golf Association, the body later renamed the USGA, alongside Newport Country Club, Shinnecock Hills, St. Andrew's in Yonkers and The Country Club. The US Amateur came here, and so did the Walker Cup. In 1928 Bobby Jones, playing captain of the American side, went round in a course record 66, and his team won 11 to 1. The Walker Cup came back in 2005. What makes Chicago Golf Club romantic, though, is not the ledger of achievements. It is the story of a builder who turned on his own work. Macdonald's original design was not dramatically altered for more than twenty years, touched only by a few suggestions from the British architect Harry Colt, the man behind Sunningdale, who at the club's request tweaked the layout to keep it competitive with more modern courses. In time the design grew antiquated all the same. In 1917 Macdonald wrote the club a brazen letter calling his own creation "one of the worst courses in the country as compared with its former position." There may be something tender in that bluntness, a father who would rather see his child rebuilt than watch it fall behind. In 1922 the members voted to bring in Seth Raynor, Macdonald's protégé, to assist his mentor in completely remodeling the course, and the renovation was completed in 1923. What stands today is nearly entirely Raynor's work. In the clubhouse, just below the clock tower, there is a small unfinished room where he drafted his plans, as though the drawing were the only thing that ever mattered there. The result is one of the most intelligently designed courses in America. Raynor's green complexes here are a world-class set, and the course holds some of the boldest and best-preserved features in his entire portfolio. Yet Macdonald has not entirely vanished. Walk the property and remnants of the original design surface throughout, like old foundations in a field. A prime example sits about 20 yards right of the current 12th green: an old Principal's Nose bunker, a trace of the course that came before. Two architects, teacher and student, overlap on the same ground, and the earlier hand shows through the later one like writing beneath fresh paint. Few people ever see any of this. The membership is one of the smaller ones among the country's finest courses, and the club remains intensely private, one of the most exclusive in America and a tee time that is highly sought after. Perhaps that is part of how it keeps its character. Chicago Golf Club was built to be first, rebuilt to be better, and still carries quiet traces of every version of itself.