Old Town Club

Overall Thoughts

Perry Maxwell’s Old Town Club is often referred to as the last great course of the Golden Age of American golf architecture. I think it should also be considered a culmination of that era—a paragon of naturalistic design, executed with remarkable skill and judgment. As restored and refined by Coore & Crenshaw, Old Town is the most fully realized example of Perry Maxwell’s work.

Bill Coore attributes the course’s greatness to two main factors: routing and green contouring.

Maxwell’s routing at Old Town wrings everything out of the rolling and varied property. No hole is flat, and no two holes use the land in the same way. The player is led on a balanced sequence of uphill, downhill, sidehill, ridge-to-ridge, and valley-to-valley walks. As a result, the course does not rely on built features to make each hole memorable. Instead, what sticks in the player’s mind is the natural terrain and vegetation, both on and off the playing corridors. Maxwell wanted the land to predominate, and he leaned on his routing expertise to avoid major earthmoving in the process of creating distinctive, strategic golf holes.

Equally evident at Old Town is Maxwell’s skill in green design. Unlike some modern imitations of linksy greens (like those at the upcoming Ryder Cup venue), Old Town’s are not wild for the sake of being wild. Every tilt, runoff, hump, and tier has a strategic purpose that relates to the rest of the hole. When Maxwell manufactured a feature, he made it count.

Last year, for one of our golf architecture mailbag podcasts, our friend Andy Lack asked which course a new architect should study before building his or her own. My answer is Old Town Club. It was here that Golden Age golf course design reached both its end and its peak. -Garrett Morrison

3 Eggs

(How We Rate Courses)

Obvious Eggs go to Old Town Club’s design and presentation. The Egg for land is a trickier call, as the course lacks the topographical theatrics of three-Egg courses like Sand Hills, North Berwick, and L.A. Country Club. Yet it’s clear why Perry Maxwell selected the Old Town site from the 1,003 acres of the Reynolds estate: while not flashy, it is walkable, well-scaled to golf, and eventful throughout, containing broad slopes as well as smaller undulations. The clincher for the third Egg, though, is the club’s tree-management program, which has exposed long views of the property’s landforms, creek system, and native grasses.

Course Tour

No. 1, par 4, 426 yards

On this ridge-to-ridge opener, you can lay up short and right of the green on your second shot and card a simple bogey. Hitting the green in regulation is a nervier prospect: the ledges left and long of the green are punishing, and the bunkers on the right are worse.

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No. 2, par 3, 167 yards

The green on this handsome par 3 is 30 yards wide, accommodating a variety of pin positions, ranging from easy-ish (middle bowl) to difficult (right shelf).

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No. 3, par 4, 428 yards

This excellent par 4 shows some of Maxwell’s go-to moves at Old Town. The fairway sits on a side slope, and if you’re on the high side, you can see the green. In order to find that position, however, you need to challenge a large fairway bunker. The defining feature of the green is a central “Maxwell roll”—or “puff” (a Bill Coore-ism), or “muffin” (a Dunlop White-ism)—which messes with lag putts after imprecise approaches.

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No. 4, par 5. 526 yards

The tee shot on the third hole is plain-looking and mostly blind, but when you reach the landing zone, which turns out to be the crest of the hill, you see the undulating valley containing the course’s next 15 holes. An impressive reveal.

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No. 5, par 4, 408 yards

Those familiar with Crystal Downs, where Maxwell served as Alister MacKenzie’s on-site associate, will recognize similarities between its sixth fairway and Old Town’s fifth. Three bunkers cut into a hill run across the corridor from short right to long left. The longer carry yields a shorter approach from a better angle.

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No. 6, par 3, 190 yards

The bunker on the right looks like a threat from the tee, but it’s actually about 50 yards short. While the sixth green has a broad open front, accepting running shots along the downslope, it falls off sharply on every other side.

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No. 7, par 4, 443 yards

There’s a huge amount of room on the right half of the seventh fairway, but the green is the smallest on the course, and it favors an approach from the heavily bunkered left side.

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No. 8, par 4, 417 yards

This is your first visit to the astounding double green that houses pins for the eighth and 17th holes. In addition to being the biggest green at Old Town (right after the smallest), it is also the most intricately contoured, with numerous Maxwell rolls to navigate.

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No. 9, par 4, 469 yards

Because of the extreme nature of its topography, the ninth is not the most loved hole at Old Town, but I find the way it banks off one side of a valley and finishes on the other unique and exciting. Steering left off the tee takes the trees on the right out of play, but it leaves a long approach from a sidehill lie. A successful drive along the inside of the dogleg requires accuracy and power.

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No. 10, par 4, 410 yards

The rarely discussed 10th hole is the best example of Maxwell’s restraint at Old Town. The green simply flows out of the right-to-left-sloping land, allowing for run-up play. A subtle roll/puff/muffin in the middle differentiates pin positions.

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No. 11, par 3, 220 yards

This downhill par 3 is one of the prettiest holes on the course but also one of the more conventional. It will likely be improved by the club’s recent decision to move the tee to the right and bring the creek along the right side of the hole more into the player’s line.

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Favorite Hole

No. 12, par 4, 454 yards

Perry Maxwell’s strategic design at Old Town—like Alister MacKenzie’s at several courses Maxwell worked on, including Crystal Downs and Augusta National—often plays with angles and sightlines simultaneously.

Looked at from a satellite, the 12th hole seems to give an advantage to the player on the left side of the fairway, as the green opens up in that direction. Better angle. On the ground, though, you’ll find that the player’s view of the green is blocked by the shoulder of a hill. Worse sightline. The right side of the fairway offers the inverse: better sightline, worse angle.

Like many of my favorite holes, the 12th at Old Town can’t be solved on Google Earth. It has to be puzzled over in three dimensions.

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No. 13, par 4, 453 yards

Most of Old Town’s greens sit more or less at grade, creating a natural appearance, but the 13th green is built up, making the approach on this up-and-over par 4 particularly exacting.

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No. 14, par 4, 339 yards

The shaping of the green and green-side hazards on this terrific short par 4 has Coore & Crenshaw’s visual signature. When C&C associate Dave Axland was shaping the two back bunkers, Bill Coore asked for their lips to be raised so that the bunkers would peer at players from behind the green like “alligator eyes.”

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No. 15, par 3, 248 yards

Considering that the 15th can stretch to 250 yards, its green is surprisingly well guarded and unreceptive. So it might be best understood as a hybrid hole in the vein of L.A. North’s seventh, where the combination of a back tee and the toughest pin position—back left at Old Town, back right at L.A.—turns what’s usually a par 3 into a “drivable” par 4.

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No. 16, par 4, 367 yards

The ridgetop 16th green is one of Old Town’s centers of gravity: you can see it from many other spots on the course before you play it.

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No. 17, par 5, 629 yards

The only par 5 on the back nine, the 17th hole incorporates about three par 5s’ worth of ideas: a creek serving as a diagonal cross-hazard both off the tee and into the green, an 80-yard-wide multi-level fairway providing two distinct options on the second shot, and a return to Maxwell’s double green.

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No. 18, par 4, 443 yards

The 18th fairway climbs gradually and feeds into bunkers on the left, but if you can place your tee ball near them, you might be able to see part of the putting surface on your approach.

Additional Content

Maxwell’s Muffins (Article)