Golf House
Open-knowledge reference entry
Golf House is a former estate house that was constructed in the early 1900s by John D. Rockefeller in Lakewood Township in Ocean County, New Jersey, United States.
Construction of the Rockefeller estate
John Rockefeller began acquiring property in Lakewood, New Jersey in March 1901. In early November 1903, he purchased 330 acres (1.3 km2), including 98 acres (400,000 m2) from the Ocean County Hunt and Country club which became the core of the Rockefeller Lakewood estate. The Club had held the first Professional Golf Association tournament on their grounds on January 1, 1898.
In March 1907, Rockefeller increased the wages given to workers at Golf House from $1.50 to $1.65 per day, as he was having difficulty obtaining enough workers to perform the improvements he had planned to the property, which included building as much as three miles (5 km) of new roads and planting 1,000 evergreen saplings around the golf course. Only residents of New Jersey were hired and all applicants required a reference from someone known by William Foerster, Rockefeller's superintendent. The prevailing wage for laborers in the area had been $1.50 per day, and The New York Times described that the 10% wage increase Rockefeller offered would put pressure on other area employers, such as George Jay Gould I, to match the higher amount.
Rockefeller's summer retreat was 30-room, 20-bathroom, three-story mansion wrapped with glass-enclosed porches. The estate included a dairy, sheepfold, woodland, and a 9-hole golf course. Rockefeller and his household would spend spring and sometime parts of the summer at Lakewood.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5580587. Authority coordinates are 40.095, -74.182. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1903, 1898 and 1907.
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This entry incorporates text from “Golf House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.