It was Grant Wood, best known for his touchstone painting American Gothic—a work of art that has spawned more satiric memes than a shirtless Jason Kelce—who inadvertently introduced me to the Old Town Club. To the best of my knowledge, Wood, who died in 1942, never hit a golf shot of any sort. But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve never touched a paintbrush, at least not one that produced anything more pleasing to the eye than some off-white semigloss trim in the dining room, a level of excellence ironically on par with my golf.
On what has become my favorite North Carolina day trip—roughly a two-hour drive from my home in Southern Pines to the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem—I inevitably find myself mesmerized by a different depiction of Wood’s Americana. The first time I visited the old Reynolds mansion, cared for now by Wake Forest University, I fell hopelessly in love with his painting titled Spring Turning, a masterful piece in which a gargantuan rolling landscape, with its large swaths of green fields under white clouds as square as the fields themselves, dwarfs the human figures who dot it. It is just one work in an exquisite collection—most of which was accumulated under the aegis of Mary Reynolds Babcock, the eldest daughter of Katharine Reynolds and tobacco scion Richard Joshua (R.J.) Reynolds—that’s now housed in what was the expansive Reynolds family home. Much to my surprise and delight, the scene Wood painted in 1936 turns out to be the perfect metaphor for the golf course the Reynolds family commissioned three years later, to be built by Perry Maxwell in a tiny corner of the 1,067-acre estate. In addition to country manors and mysterious stories—Reynolda excels in both categories—the barons of billions often leave in their wake a trail of great works of art. The Wood and the Maxwell qualify equally.
When I first started visiting what I have come to consider “my” Grant Wood, I didn’t know a damn thing about Maxwell’s Old Town. I barely knew it existed. This was not, I’m sorry to say, an unusual state of affairs. Time had dulled the course’s brilliance. The members knew it and loved it. The rest of the world had, for all intents and purposes, forgotten it. But a decade of work, spearheaded by a member of the Demon Deacons golf team, has changed all that.
My first encounter with Perry Maxwell came when I covered the 1980 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Prairie Dunes, won by Juli Inkster, who would return to Hutchinson, Kansas, 22 years later—as would I—to win the U.S. Women’s Open there. Bill Coore, who walked the hills of Old Town as a student at Wake Forest, and his design partner, Ben Crenshaw, have had two bites at the restoration apple in Winston-Salem. The first, in 2013, tended to Old Town’s bunkers. If such a thing were possible, Coore and Crenshaw seem to have lifted the bunkers right out of the sandy terrain of Prairie Dunes and plopped them down here, replacing the course’s old, saucer-shaped traps with natural-looking, ragged-edged bunkers filled with brown sand from the nearby Yadkin River. I suspect that just about the only thing on the planet that Coore, one of golf’s most agreeable people, hates is geometry, because his work shows a profound loathing for straight lines and perfect circles in nature. Old Town’s bunkering is now anything but linear.
At roughly the time during which Oakmont Country Club and others began divesting themselves of thousands of trees, Old Town was, serendipitously, doing the same. Over a period of two decades or so, Old Town took out more than 6,000 of them, which is to say they stopped counting after 6,000. Built on a mere 165 hilly acres once devoted to grazing horses on open pastureland—the watering troughs still exist—the course that Maxwell routed still somehow seems vast. Thankfully, the removal of the trees restored the original panoramas. When you reach the crest of the fairway on the fourth hole, it’s as if the entire rolling course, dotted with players in the distance—like the figures in Spring Turning—lays out before you. Wide fairways merge. One thing flows into the next.
“It’s so artfully done. To be able to knit that sequence of holes on that site in the fashion that he did was, for me, absolute genius,” Coore tells me. “When I used to carry my bag from the dorm on the campus straight out onto the course, to be perfectly candid, it wasn’t in particularly good condition. It didn’t play the way it was probably intended.”
Coore & Crenshaw came back in 2023 for an ambitious refurbishing, banishing more of those pesky straight lines by changing the square and rectangular tees to less structured areas, converting the greens from bent to Bermuda and, in the process, enlarging many of them to make the greenside bunkers more relevant. All the while, they preserved the “Maxwell’s rolls” that defined the original architect’s trademark internal contouring on his putting surfaces.
Coore grew up roughly 50 miles from Old Town, down a dirt road in rural Davidson County, North Carolina, and he’s often said his understanding of how interesting, artistic and enjoyable golf looks and feels was informed by his youthful rounds on Old Town and Pinehurst No. 2. “I didn’t know why I liked Old Town so much. I didn’t know why I liked Pinehurst so much,” says Coore. “I was never a very good player. Never. I was a very short, fairly accurate player. I couldn’t carry every long shot. Both Pinehurst No. 2, even being the championship venue it is, and Old Town didn’t dictate how you had to play. You could figure out a way. Though I don’t think I could have articulated it at the time, I liked those courses because I could actually play them. The golf courses don’t tell you how you have to play; you’re allowed to make your decisions based on your own game.”
Even back in the pre-renovation days, as the home course to Wake Forest’s golf teams, Old Town had a professorial quality. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Arnold Palmer, Lanny Wadkins, Darren Clarke, most of the Haas family, Webb Simpson, Will Zalatoris and a parade of other future professionals all took classes in Maxwell’s studio. “It’s the fine parts of the game that Old Town teaches you,” says Curtis Strange, who was a student at Wake from 1974 to 1976. “There’s not a level second shot on the golf course. How to take spin off it, hit it high, low and from un-level lies—Old Town teaches you how to play the game. It’s one of those golf courses you can play every day the rest of your life and never get bored.”
There are two grand Southern cities—Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia—whose historic structures survived in large numbers after the Civil War because the South was, for a long time, too poor to engage in much of anything that resembled urban renewal. (And, in the case of Savannah, because Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman thought it was too pretty to burn to the ground.) They made do with what they had. Some golf courses are like that. “One of the beauties of Old Town, and I think Prairie Dunes falls into this category too,” says Coore, “is that, either for reasons of funding or whatever, it didn’t chase this idea that we have to modernize our course—‘We have to do this; we have to do that. Our course is old; it doesn’t fit the modern game. Let’s change.’ It didn’t do that. As a result, it stayed intact, to the benefit of Ben and me and guys who were fortunate enough to work there a bit.”
It was Charles Babcock and his art-collecting wife, Mary, who donated the acreage for Old Town. And Babcock happened to have a close friend who was intimately involved in another Southern golf course: Clifford Roberts, who suggested that he hire Maxwell because, at the time, the architect was doing some work at Augusta National. Augusta’s seventh hole features a green complex where Maxwell seems to have doffed his cap to Old Town’s par-3 second. That’s just one of many connections between the clubs. The first golf professional at Old Town was Guy Paulsen, who worked for Roberts and Bobby Jones. Like Augusta, Old Town was built with the Old Course back of mind. In The Midwest Associate: The Life and Work of Perry Duke Maxwell, Christopher Clouser writes of Old Town that “the merging fairways, the depressions around the greens, and the concept of greens within the greens all point toward this course being an ode to the course that Maxwell loved more than any other, St. Andrews.” Old Town even has a double green, shared by the eighth and 17th holes. It was Coore, however, who came up with the idea of crisscrossing the tee shots from the shared teeing area on Nos. 9 and 18, a touch that has given Old Town what is likely its most enduring trademark.
The course has changed markedly since Palmer and Coore and Strange played their collegiate rounds there. (Coore, as is his wont, demurs, “Technically, I was on the varsity team as a sophomore, but I never played a match or a tournament. I wasn’t very good. It’s a bit of a misrepresentation to say I played golf at Wake Forest.”) But in other ways, it’s the same. There are still no tee times. You simply show up. Nearly half the membership walks. There are foursomes. Fivesomes. Sixsomes. Even sevensomes. Whatever you like, as long as you aren’t slow. The supple-backed kids from Wake still boom it off the tee. The Five-and-Dimers still don’t play for much beyond pocket change, and the associated professors—real and self-appointed—at the round table in the grillroom continue dispensing enlightenment.
The anonymity Old Town once possessed, however, is gone. It’s been rediscovered by the new wave of architecture experts and is steadily moving up the various course rankings. More and more visitors are trying to get a peek at Maxwell’s masterpiece. Coore warned them: “If we knock the dust off this gem, polish it a bit, it’s not likely to be so unknown anymore.” Almost as if it was Turning Spring.
Yardage Book: No. 17
I’ve been involved as a director of Old Town Club for more than 20 years, serving the last 13 as golf chair and stewarding the Coore & Crenshaw restorations in 2013 and 2023, respectively. In my estimation, the two most charismatic features on the golf course start and end with hole 17. The volcano-esque escarpment at the tee and the gigantic double green are architectural marvels and constitute two of the more memorable features on any hole anywhere.
As Dr. Alister MacKenzie’s former partner, Perry Maxwell was a staunch proponent of the strategic school of design, which offers golfers multiple ways of playing a hole and fair opportunities for redemption if they lack precision along the way. The 17th is the poster child for that philosophy.
At 629 yards, it requires three shots for even the most accomplished golfers. The strategy starts with the tee shot from that elevated landform, where golfers must negotiate Silas Creek, which diagonally fronts the landing area. One may choose to carry the short-left side of the creek—the safer play—knowing it leaves a more challenging shot into the left-to-right, side-sloping approach.
Alternatively, one may attempt to fly the long-right side of the water—leaving a better angle into the sloping hillside. But placing a drive on the right not only requires a longer carry but also imposes a greater degree of accuracy, as Silas Creek flanks the hole to the right as well. For many, it’s a risk worth taking: The second shot has a much better chance of holding the steep hillside on the high left, which delivers the preferred visibility and angle into the 17,000-square-foot double green.
In Coore’s words, “Shotmakers quickly learn the art of shaping the ball high up against all sorts of side-slopes at Old Town just to hold the grade of the terrain on the bottom side.” Indeed, one must consider both the curvature and the trajectory of the second shot when positioning the ball off the tee. It’s a risk-reward proposition tempting golfers to bite off as much of the creek as they can.
The steep, side-hill terrain at the approach is blind from the fairway, and so are a series of bunkers—two of which guard the high-side terrain, while the Silas Creek “dam” bunker gobbles up misplaced shots on the low side. A short centerline bunker provides some visual guidance, distinguishing high-side and low-side positions. And still, after all the deliberation, some actually prefer the bottom-right side of the approach for its flat lies, despite the additional distance and poor visibility.
Looking at the third shot, Silas Creek cuts back diagonally in front of the double green, the genesis of which dates back to the course’s construction in 1939. Clifford Roberts, co-founder of Augusta National Golf Club, suggested that Maxwell join the two adjacent greens at this location. Given Maxwell’s extensive work in Augusta, Roberts was well aware that he possessed an unwavering affection for the Old Course at St. Andrews, home to seven double greens. Roberts purportedly added, “And it would make for interesting grillroom conversations after your round.”
Located in the communal epicenter of the course layout, the double green is brimming with a variety of bulges, commonly known as “Maxwell’s rolls,” which resemble a Jurassic burial ground. In Coore & Crenshaw jargon, each hump was referred to as a “big guy” or a “little guy,” depending on its size. Smaller puffs were even called “doodads.” A putting surface this bold and venturesome undoubtedly warranted its own unique vernacular during its 2013 re-creation.
The middle section of the double green is a raised plateau to provide some physical distinction between the putting surfaces of Nos. 8 and 17. In Maxwell fashion, Coore utilized rolls to prop up pin-able positions at different elevations throughout the green, much like the plateaued greens at holes 5 and 14 at Augusta. The elevations are not formally tiered or stepped up in a stark, linear manner, but rather rolling and free-flowing into different levels within the surface. The middle plateau of the double green is dedicated for No. 17 pin locations only, and, when used, they effectively add 15 yards to the hole.
The main goal from the approach is to stop the ball with a short iron on the same level as the pin. For your best bid at birdie, a Maxwell’s roll should not be between your ball and the cup.
—Dunlop White III
