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John Moorhead, Jr. inducted into Western Pennsylvania Golf Hall of Fame in Class of 2024

By Josh Rowntree, WPGA Director of Communications • November 14, 2024

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Regarded as the “Father of Western Pennsylvania Golf,” John Moorhead Jr. was born in Pittsburgh in 1859. He was educated at Phillips Academy and Yale University before returning to Pittsburgh to work for his father’s steel company, Moorhead Brothers & Company, Inc.

For his entire life, Moorhead was an avid sportsman. At Yale, he played football alongside Walter Camp, considered by many as the “Father of American Football.” After returning to Pittsburgh, he continued to play football, as well as rugby and baseball, before being introduced to golf. During this time, Moorhead also was a founding member and served as the first president of the Allegheny Athletic Association, which fielded America’s first professional football player and professional team.

Moorhead was introduced to golf while vacationing in 1893 at the Essex County Club in New England. As he later told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“One day I saw a bearded old Scotty with some peculiar-looking clubs. I asked him, ‘What are those?’ He replied, ‘Golf clubs.’ On further conversation I learned that golf was a Scotch game, played on a course of, say, a mile and a half or so in length, hitting a small gutty ball into holes placed in the ground. I engaged him to play the next day, and I was so captivated by the game that I have been its slave ever since.”

Though captivated, he returned to Pittsburgh without a course to play the game. In 1894, Moorhead planted six pea cans in the infield of the abandoned harness-racing track in Homewood known as the Pittsburgh Driving Park, thus creating a now-multimillion-dollar industry in our region.

The following year, Moorhead and his neighbors in Allegheny City, today Pittsburgh’s North Side, organized the Allegheny Country Club, the first official golf club in Pittsburgh. The club’s first golf course, a six-hole affair originally located between Brighton Road and California Avenue, was designed by Moorhead himself. In 1902, the club moved to its present location in Sewickley.

Over the next few decades, Moorhead made waves both on and off the course. He became the first Western Pennsylvanian to participate in a USGA Championship (1896 U.S. Amateur) and first captain/player of an inter-city/inter-club match in Pittsburgh. That same year, he also designed the now-defunct golf course in Cresson, Pennsylvania, a long-time summer retreat for Pittsburgh’s elite class.

In 1899, he called the meeting at the Duquesne Club that officially founded the Western Pennsylvania Golf Association (WPGA) and served as the organization’s first President (1899-1913). The following year, he served as a director of the Western Golf Association. In 1909, Moorhead was among the six founding members of the Pennsylvania Golf Association and served as its first president (1909-10).

Moorhead remained a leading figure in Western Pennsylvania golf until his death in March 1927.

About the WPGA
Founded in 1899, the Western Pennsylvania Golf Association is the steward of amateur golf in the region. Started by five Member Clubs, the association now has nearly 200 Member Clubs and 40,000 members. The WPGA conducts 14 individual competitions and 10 team events, and administers the WPGA Scholarship Fund.