Perry Maxwell

In 1914, Perry Maxwell was in his mid-30s and held a comfortable post at a bank, but his life took a turn when he visited the National Golf Links of America, C.B. Macdonald’s masterpiece on Long Island. Maxwell immediately felt inspired to build a golf course on his own property, a rolling piece of farmland in Ardmore, Oklahoma. This course would come to be known as Dornick Hills Golf and Country Club, and it’s still in operation today—perhaps in better shape than ever after a renovation by Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design.

Maxwell’s wife Ray, seeing how much pleasure he got out of designing Dornick Hills, encouraged him to cut back on his duties at the bank and take up golf architecture full time. After she suddenly passed away from a ruptured appendix in 1919, he did just that, partly to honor her memory.

Throughout the 1920s, as golf expanded across the United States, Maxwell worked primarily for small clubs in Oklahoma, most of which had very modest means. He received a somewhat healthier budget for his 1923 design at Twin Hills Golf and Country Club in Oklahoma City, and the result was one of the best-regarded courses in the state.

Maxwell’s big break came in 1926, when Alister MacKenzie, the English architect who would soon design Cypress Point and Royal Melbourne, sent a letter to Maxwell asking to form a partnership. Over the next several years, Maxwell served as MacKenzie’s “Midwest associate,” supervising construction sites at Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club, Crystal Downs Country Club in Northern Michigan, the University of Michigan Golf Course, and the Ohio State University Golf Course. 

The collaboration likely would have continued if not for the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and MacKenzie’s death from a heart attack in 1934. But it was because of his association with MacKenzie that Maxwell was chosen to make substantial changes to Augusta National in 1937 and ’38.

Around the same time, as the U.S. golf industry slowly woke up from the Depression, Maxwell created the courses that have defined his legacy ever since: Southern Hills Country Club (1936), Colonial Country Club (a 1936 co-design with John Bredemus, with a solo redesign in 1941), the original nine at Prairie Dunes Country Club (1937), the Iowa State University Golf Course (1938), and Old Town Club (1939). 

The United States went to war in 1941, interrupting Maxwell’s run of brilliance. After World War II ended and before Maxwell died in 1952, he designed a handful of courses alongside his son Press, including the University of Oklahoma Golf Course (1950) and Oak Cliff Country Club, now known as the Golf Club of Dallas (1951).