Baguio Country Club

Baguio Country Club (BCC) is inextricably linked to the history of the city in the clouds. When William Howard Taft was tasked with governing the Philippine Islands, he directed his friend, William Cameron Forbes, to look for a cool place in the Sierra Madre Mountains, of which he had heard rumors. You see, Taft was a large man who found the heat and humidity of the tropics too much for his corpulence. He longed for the cool temperate climes of the Northeastern United States and was determined to find such a place in the Islands.
It was this determination that saw the building of the Benguet Road and the subsequent establishment of the City of Baguio. Of course, once there, there had to be something to do for those who made the trek up the winding mountain road. To that end, Forbes tapped his associate, Dallas McGrew, to start a club. The founding members, including Forbes and McGrew, established BCC in 1905 and circulated the prospectus for membership the next year. For a fifty-peso initiation fee and a twenty-peso annual fee, one could avail of membership, provided, of course, he met the social criteria.
The club wasted no time and purchased 32 hectares of suitable land from Mateo Cariño, an Igorot chief who also owned the land on which Club John Hay now sits, for the princely sum of Php 2,400. The first clubhouse was little more than a large hut with a thatched roof; it was built in one day for Php 400. The club’s first facilities were two tennis courts, croquet grounds, and a three-hole golf course. In 1907, Major Gallagher of the US Army, Mr. Marshall of International Bank, and Mang Dangal from the Manila Club were retained by Forbes to lay out anew the golf course. And on March 25, 1908 the club began serving food to its patrons