Seabright

Seabright opened its shingled clubhouse in 1886 with three grass courts and a cricket field. The cricket field became tennis courts in 1890, and terraces added in 1900 and 1910 brought the club to twenty-two grass courts. In 1926 officials of the national association recognised it as the oldest continuously active tennis club in the United States, a claim others dispute.

Its Invitation tournament drew Bill Tilden, Molla Mallory, Helen Wills and Helen Jacobs, and Dwight Davis, donor of the Davis Cup, played and became an honorary member. The event ended in 1950, when wear on the grass and the lack of permanent stands made it hard to sustain.

The club’s bullseye emblem recalls its early archery, and its terraced lawns survive almost as they were laid out. Seabright belongs to the old shore clubs of New York and New Jersey that first made grass tennis an American summer pastime, and it still plays on the courts the game’s first generation knew.