Featured Golf Course

The Eglin Golf Course's Eagle Course is located in the City of Niceville in Okaloosa County. Although the golf course is located within the city limits of Niceville it was originally associated with the town of Valparaiso. In 1922, Chicago businessman James E. Plew (founder of the Chicago Towel Company), came to Valparaiso and became one of Northwest Florida's pioneer developers. He founded the Bank of Valparaiso and constructed the Valparaiso Inn.  At the same time, he organized the Chicago Country Club of Valparaiso, which constructed the golf course. Memberships were marketed to Chicago businessmen, doctors and lawyers who came to the area.

The golf course operated as a 9-hole course until 1927 when the firm of William Langford and Theodore Moreau was hired to design an 18-hole course. In November of that same year, 200 golfers left Chicago aboard a special deluxe train to attend the formal opening of the golf course. Noted golf writer John Healy wrote, “Facing a landlocked bay down in the Gulf Coast country, on the Vale of Paradise, where the sun shines and shines, where the breezes are balmy and gentile, lies as ‘sporty’ an 18 hole course as may be found south of the Mason-Dixon line.” Like the fate of many private golf clubs of the late 1920s, the country club went bankrupt in 1929, and the name was changed to the Valparaiso Country Club. 

The Valparaiso Inn and the Valparaiso Country Club operated as a resort throughout the 1930s, advertising in the 1939 Okaloosa News Journal as having “Beautiful Grass, Greens and Tees, 6,350 yards, 5 water Holes, with fees of $1.00 per day.”  Shortly after, the course was reduced back to nine holes and left to nature’s devices for nearly a decade.

In 1934, Plew offered the U.S. government a donation of 1,460 contiguous acres for a bombing and gunnery range that became known as the Valparaiso Bombing and Gunnery Range. In 1937, the base was re-designated Eglin Field in honor of Lieutenant Colonel Frederick I. Eglin, U.S. Air Corps, killed on January 1, 1937, in an aircraft accident.  

In 1949, the Plew family sold the course to the government and the course was renovated and re-established as an 18-hole course. The Eagle Golf Course (named after the F-15 Eagle fighter aircraft) is one of two 18-hole courses at the Eglin Golf Course Complex.