A golf course that has anchored a stretch of County Street in Attleboro since 1954 is about to disappear. Stone-E-Lea Golf Course, run by the same family for 72 years, will close for good in December, and the 140.74-acre property is now being marketed to developers as a major redevelopment opportunity.
The LaPierre family announced in August that the course would close after the 2026 season, according to thesunchronicle.com, ending a run that began when Edward Lapierre Sr. opened the course in 1954 with his three sons, Eddie, Albert and Leo, as WPRI reports. The family has owned it ever since, spanning three generations, according to Bisnow, which also reports that owner David Lapierre has dealt with recent health struggles. The site at 1411 County Street sits adjacent to the Attleboro Industrial Park with visibility along I-95, between the Boston and Providence metro areas, and already has city sewer and water on-site, per listing details from 128cre.com.
Brokerage Pitches a Rare Large-Scale Site
128 CRE confirmed this month that it is marketing Stone-E-Lea for sale, describing the parcel as a large-scale redevelopment opportunity. Bisnow identifies the brokerage team handling the listing as David Linehan, Adam Meixner, Jeremy Freid and Tyler Capecci. Despite the active marketing push, the owners have not settled on what comes next — WPRI reports the family said they are still working through what the future holds for the course.
That uncertainty leaves open whether the land stays in some recreational use, becomes housing, or takes another path entirely — a question the available listing materials and news coverage do not yet answer. What is clear is the timeline for golfers: the course will close permanently in December, and anyone holding a gift card or club credit is urged to use it before January 1, 2027, per WPRI. Attleboro High School's golf team, which has used Stone-E-Lea for its home matches, is already searching for a new location for the 2027 season, the station notes.
Part of a Broader Massachusetts Pattern
Stone-E-Lea's closure fits a pattern playing out across Massachusetts, where shuttered golf courses have become major development targets in recent years, according to Bisnow's reporting. In Leicester, the former Leicester Country Club — a 223-acre site that closed in 2025 — is the subject of a DW Capital proposal for 290 residential units in a first phase, with a later phase planned to include retail, as the Boston Business Journal reported in April.
Further west, Holyoke's 110-acre Wyckoff Country Club is slated to close Nov. 1, with developer Cesar Ruiz planning to convert the land into a neighborhood of possibly more than 100 upscale houses, according to masslive.com. The Daily Hampshire Gazette reports the project could include up to 126 homes, with the club's owner citing increased housing demand, an oversaturation of area golf courses and the rise of virtual golfing alternatives as reasons behind the shift. Massachusetts leaders have broadly been looking to build more housing, Bisnow notes, and a 2025 UMass Donahue Institute study cited by masslive.com found Hampden County alone faces a shortage of nearly 13,000 homes, with almost 23,500 needed across four Western Massachusetts counties.
A National Shakeout in the Golf Industry
The trend extends well beyond Massachusetts. Reuters has reported that roughly 205 U.S. golf courses closed in a single recent year, trimming the national total to about 14,800, with the National Golf Foundation attributing the wave of closures to a correction in supply and demand following two decades of overbuilding. Many owners now see selling or redeveloping their land as an exit strategy from unprofitable operations, according to the outlet, and most shuttered courses end up as housing developments, though some become parks, orchards or vineyards instead. A similar debate played out in Denver, where the trust controlling the 155-acre Park Hill Golf Course weighed selling the land to the city for potential affordable housing, Reuters reported.
What Attleboro's Zoning Rules Could Mean
Any eventual redevelopment of Stone-E-Lea would have to navigate Attleboro's municipal rules. The city's zoning ordinance lists a country, fishing, tennis or golf club as a special-permit use within residential districts, and any proposed development site of five or more acres within an R zoning district is eligible for the city's open-space residential-development provisions as an alternative to a conventional subdivision, according to the City of Attleboro zoning ordinance. Under that standard-design option, at least half of a site's total land area must be preserved as protected open space, and any special-permit application would need to show it won't create undue traffic congestion or impair pedestrian safety. The property's current zoning district has not been verified. The city's Department of Planning and Development provides technical and administrative support to the Zoning and Planning Boards that would ultimately weigh in on any future proposal.
For now, no buyer, purchase price or redevelopment plan has been announced for the Attleboro property, and whether the land stays recreational, becomes housing, or something else entirely remains an open question the LaPierre family says it is still sorting out.
