Essex County Country Club began, fittingly for a place that would one day sit on a hill, with a merger of hunters and tobogganers. In 1887 the Essex Hunt Club and the Essex Toboggan Club joined to become the oldest country club in New Jersey. By 1900 golf had taken root on an 18-hole course by the pioneering Alex Findlay. But the story that still lives on the ground begins a few miles away, when the club moved to a massive hill in West Orange and handed the land to a young designer named A.W. Tillinghast. That was 1918, and Tillinghast was only beginning. His course opened to rave reviews and helped launch him toward Winged Foot and the larger career that followed. You can still feel his hand on the front nine. Holes 1 through 6 and the 9th are his, played over steep slopes. Earth was moved only to build bunkers, mounds and green pads, so the land does most of the talking. The ground heaves and falls, and the holes go along with it, bold because the hill gave them no choice. Then the club grew ambitious. In 1925 it wanted 36 holes and called in Seth Raynor. Raynor laid out a lower eighteen that later went public and was sold off in the seventies, when the club fell on hard times. It survives today as the Francis A. Byrne course. Up on the hill he kept Tillinghast's seven and drew eleven new holes of his own. He never saw them built. Raynor died in 1926, and his assistant Charles Banks, known as "Steamshovel," finished the work later that year. It was the first of the many courses Banks would go on to create. That handoff explains the course. Most of the front nine is some ten years older than the back. It carries a different look and feel from the overt style Raynor and Banks favored, and the severity of the land deepens the contrast. The back nine is often called the best in New Jersey, its rolling ground shaping one dramatic hole after another. Raynor and Banks loved the templates of their mentor, Charles Blair Macdonald, and the course boasts a Redan, a Maiden, a Double Plateau, an Eden, a Punchbowl and an Alps. Each is a familiar idea bent to a fierce piece of ground. The 14th sums up the place in 328 yards. It climbs uphill to a kidney-shaped punchbowl green, and it holds another Raynor signature, a Lion's Mouth bunker. It is short enough to tempt you and strange enough to punish you. Before it, the 534-yard 8th plays downhill and across water. The one-shotters run from 169 yards all the way to 255, so par never comes cheaply, and six par fours stretch well past 400 yards. The course has been tended with care. In the new millennium Gil Hanse led a restoration, with input from George Bahto. New tees pushed the course past 7,100 yards, fairway bunkers were added and every other bunker was renovated. Most important, hundreds of trees came down, letting air and strategy back in. Hanse drew a long-term master plan in 2004, and twenty years later his firm returned to rebuild all the bunkers, bring back lost ones, add drainage and redesign the first hole. That last change touched Tillinghast's own opening. Thomas Edison was a member here. The ending, though, belongs to the members of today. The 18th is a par four of some 490 yards, and the approach climbs more than 40 feet to a tricky two-tiered green in front of the clubhouse. On that hole a player can invoke the "aloha bet," double or nothing, which turns the hardest walk of the day into the most suspenseful one.