Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:34:00

The LPGA has been coming back to the same Portland riverbank for half a century. Columbia Edgewater Country Club at 2220 NE Marine Drive was established in 1924 as Columbia Country Club, and its eighteen holes opened on 11 July 1925 - the seventh eighteen-hole course in Portland - designed by Arthur Vernon "A.V." Macan, the Dublin-born architect who became the premier course designer of the Pacific Northwest's golden age, with more than sixty designs and renovations including Seattle Golf Club and Royal Colwood in British Columbia to his name. Walter Hagen teed it up here in 1929, an early signal of the course's tournament calibre. The championship pedigree is deep on both tours: the club hosted the PGA Tour's Portland Open in 1961-63 and 1966 - Billy Casper and Jack Nicklaus each won the event three times during its Oregon years - along with Oregon Opens, Oregon Amateurs across seven decades, the Northwest Open and US Open sectional qualifying for Pebble Beach in 2010. Its defining relationship, though, is with the LPGA: the Portland Classic, founded in 1972 and the tour's longest-running non-major, has been played at Columbia Edgewater for the vast majority of its editions since 1974, through the Ping, Safeway and Cambia sponsorships to today's Standard Portland Classic. Annika Sorenstam's 2002 rout and Chanettee Wannasaen's 26-under 2023 masterpiece bookend the record books. The clubhouse story has its own drama: the original 1926 building on the banks of the Columbia burned to the ground in a 1979 Christmas-tree fire; its 1980 replacement was transformed by a nearly 9-million-dollar renovation completed in 2024 for the club's centennial, modernising the entire facility alongside the pool, driving range and pro shop. Set on Marine Drive minutes from Portland International Airport, with Macan's parkland routing threading toward the river, Columbia Edgewater remains what it has been for a hundred years - the Northwest's most tournament-tested private club, and the LPGA's August home.