One hundred years ago, women playing golf was frowned upon. While others discouraged them, the Oahu Country Club embraced female golfers, at least by standards of the early 1900s.

A lot of people drive by the Oahu Country Club off Pali Highway and have no idea it has been the premier supporter of women’s golf in Hawaii.

The first person to tee off when the club’s course opened in 1907 was Annie Walker Faxon-Bishop. Women could join without a husband member. The first women’s golf tournament in Hawaii was held there in 1934. The first women’s locker room at a Hawaii golf club was there, too.

The Oahu Country Club was an alternative to the long trip 100 years ago to Moanalua Golf Course, which had opened in 1898. Moanalua was four miles from the train line. Oahu Country Club was close to the end of the Liliha trolley.

The Manoa Golf Course was Oahu’s second golf course. It opened in 1904 but was sold for development a year later. It straddled Oahu Avenue and Manoa Road just Ewa of what would become the College Hill area of lower Manoa. The University of Hawaii would not open there until 1912.

A trophy was made for a tournament at the Manoa Golf Course, but it closed before it could be held. So the organizers gave it to the Oahu Country Club when it opened. That’s why we have a Manoa Cup but no Manoa Golf Course. The Manoa Cup recently celebrated its 100th anniversary.

The location of the club is historic. Hawaiian legend says that the first man, Kane, was born in Waolani Valley, the Ewa side of Nuuanu Valley.

A large boulder, Pohaku Aumiumi, can be found near the entrance to the club. It’s 10 feet long and 4 feet high. According to Mary Kawena Pukui, legend says that in ancient times two groups of menehune — the Silent Ones and the Noisy Ones — wanted to move the stone but did not agree on the direction. They tugged in opposite directions, and the imprints of their hands can be seen on the stone today. Aumiumi means "to pull against or contend."

Nuuanu was Oahu’s agricultural center 200 years ago. When King Kamehameha I attacked Oahu, nearly 30,000 were killed, and much of the valley’s agricultural infrastructure was destroyed.

After the battle King Kamehameha I began rebuilding Nuuanu. He enlisted Abner Paki (father of Bernice Pauahi) who brought hundreds of men to Nuuanu to construct "auwai," or ditches. These ditches diverted water from streams to the taro loi that extended mauka of today’s Judd Street.

Nuuanu taro patches provided most of Honolulu’s poi, taro greens, bananas, potatoes, oopu and freshwater shrimp. Rice replaced some of the taro in later years.

As an example to his people, Kamehameha the Great farmed taro in Nuuanu. His farm and houses were about where the lower part of the country club is today and extended toward Kapalama. From the air one can see where some of the lower fairways were once terraced.

The auwai of Nuuanu still exist, although the taro fields are long gone. A trip to the Dowsett Highlands area reveals several running peacefully through neighborhood backyards.

Another royal lived on what is now the country club. The girl who would become Queen Emma grew up with her hanai family, the Rookes. They had a home in town on the corner of Beretania Street and Nuuanu Avenue, and a large Hawaiian-style grass house about where the clubhouse is today.

Wade Warren Thayer led the group that bought the land known as Waolani ("heavenly wilderness") from the queen’s heirs. The Oahu Country Club opened 106 years ago on June 8, 1906.

Club historian Don Nicholson calls the club the place where the game of golf and its traditions "took root and flourished. Hawaii’s first golf professional, its oldest and most prestigious amateur championship, its first women’s championship and its first great male and female golfers all trace their origins to the historic club."

"For an amateur golfer in Hawaii, the Manoa Cup was the holy grail — the most historic, the most prestigious and the most difficult of all tournaments to win," Nicholson believes. "When you played for the Manoa Cup, you were playing for a place in the history of island golf."