The tide had a say at Essex County Club long before any golfer did. Near Boston, in Manchester, Massachusetts, the ground still remembers the water, and nowhere more than at the 3rd, where the course runs out across a tidal flood plain and asks you to make peace with it. The club opened in 1893 with the first nine-hole course in New England, and it has kept a low profile ever since. It was the sixth club to join the United States Golf Association, the first after the founding five of St Andrews, Newport, Shinnecock Hills, Chicago and Brookline. That is a lineage most clubs would wear loudly. Essex mostly doesn't. It hosted the U.S. Women's Amateur in 1897 and again in 1912, then drifted out of the spotlight for the better part of a century, as if it had said what it needed to say. In 1910 Donald Ross, Dornoch's most famous son, arrived as club professional. He stayed seven years, expanding the original nine to eighteen and reworking the holes he had inherited. Outside of Pinehurst, he probably spent more time personally working on these holes than on any other course he designed. You can still see where he lived. His yellow house sits to the left of the 2nd green, behind a tee sometimes used for the 15th, hard to miss. It turns the course into a kind of neighborhood, with the architect's home looking over his own work. Then comes the 3rd, and its contradictions. It is a monster of a par five, nearly as long as the two par fours before it put together. The drive must avoid a runoff channel of sand and pebbles, a stream runs along the left, and huge bunkers wait on the right, so reaching the green in regulation is a real test. Yet the hole's soul is small and strange. The green is believed to date to the club's opening in 1893, which would make it the oldest in the country, and in its front-left corner lies a deep swale people call the bathtub. It was probably left behind when a tree stump came out. A less adventurous hand would have filled it in or turned it into a bunker. Instead it became the green's defining feature, and a hole that can seem understated ends at a putting surface that refuses to be. The 12th holds its own small argument. From the commonly used tee, up the hill to the right of the 11th green, it is a straightaway par four with a blind downhill drive you can hit with abandon. From a second tee, down and to the left, it becomes a sharp dogleg demanding something under 200 yards off the tee. Nearly everyone agrees the lower version is worse, awkward where the other is generous. Both tees remain, two ideas of one hole sitting side by side. For the past twenty-three years Bruce Hepner, working through Tom Doak's Renaissance Golf Design, has been taking out trees and coaxing back the original character of the greens and bunkers. Since 2007 he has had an enthusiastic ally in Eric Richardson, who looks after the grounds. Together they achieved something rare: a true restoration of Ross, with bouncy fairways, wild greens and uneven lies, a hidden gem left in its rugged, natural state. In June 2010 the spotlight returned for the Curtis Cup, and the Americans kept their winning streak alive against Great Britain and Ireland. Then the visitors left, and Essex settled back into its quiet, with the tide nearby and the yellow house still watching over the 2nd green.