Club moves to Fox Meadow estate of Charles Butler around 1885. Allen M. Butler elected SLTC President (1885-1886)

Perhaps to accommodate the additional numbers, the Club shifted to the Fox Meadow estate of Charles Butler, great-uncle of “the Butler boys.” At the time, he was still enlarging his landholdings. In 1887 he owned 358 acres; by 1899, his only surviving child and heir, Emily O. Butler, owned 491 acres stretching from Wayside Lane to Fenimore Road and from Tompkins Road to the Bronx River.

On four grass courts near the Butler mansion, members of the tennis club played two tournaments in 1885, a Ladies’ Singles and a Mixed Doubles.

A year later membership had grown to forty-four, and two more grass courts were added.

J. Thomas Scharf’s massive History of Westchester County described the three-year-old tennis club as the “only organization of a peculiarly social nature” in Scarsdale, and said it “now forms a prominent feature in the social life of the town.” [see excerpt below]

Annual dues in the new club were $1 in 1886, with an initiation fee of $2. Bylaws permitted members to bring guests and imposed a fine of not less than twenty-five cents for “failure to wear tennis shoes while on the courts.”

Source: Diana Reische, Fox Meadow Tennis Club – The First Hundred Years, 1983