The history of Barrington Hills Country Club is beautifully documented in a large, 164-page hardcover book titled, “A Club in the Country.” We asked its author, Patty Dowd Schmitz, to share her perspective on the Club.
“Barrington Hills Country Club is a foundational and historic organization in the Barrington area,” Schmitz said. “In the 1920s, it was the epicenter of the social structure in the Barrington ‘countryside’, which had become a destination for many industrial-age businessmen who wished to move out of the city and back to their roots by establishing gentlemen’s farms in country locations. The wide-open spaces of Barrington Hills and the low-key spirit of the Club lured many families to our area who might otherwise have settled on the North Shore or in Lake Geneva, which had preceded Barrington as centers of country life at that time. One hundred years later, the Barrington Hills Country Club still stands as an important gathering place for those who enjoy the quieter life of Barrington, and oh, if its walls could talk—they hold many of our area’s most important stories from the past century and beyond.”
Read the Quintessential Barrington feature story here.
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