Anson Point

Anson Point is the third golf course at Palmetto Bluff, routed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw across 500 acres of Lowcountry landscape bordering the New River. The par-71, 7,017-yard design embraces marshland, preserved forests, and the natural terrain contours of the South Carolina coast, and is open only to Palmetto Bluff Golf Club members and their guests.

Anson Point at Palmetto Bluff opened January 2, 2026, as the third golf course at Palmetto Bluff and its second eighteen-hole championship layout — the 20,000-acre Lowcountry development along the May River that has anchored Southern private-community golf since the original May River Golf Club debuted in 2005. Designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, two architects whose minimalist philosophy and commitment to ground-level strategic complexity have earned them a position among the most respected design partnerships in modern golf, Anson Point represents a departure from both the resort-oriented design approach common to South Carolina's coastal courses and from the residential golf development model that produced the original May River course. The course's name honors Admiral George Anson, the mid-eighteenth-century British naval officer and explorer who circumnavigated the globe between 1740 and 1744. Anson was a figure of considerable historical significance in the British maritime tradition, and his name applied to this section of Palmetto Bluff — set in a planned community area that will eventually become the development's third village — connects the contemporary course to the Age of Exploration that first brought European settlement to the South Carolina Lowcountry.

The design partnership between South Street Partners (Palmetto Bluff's owner) and Coore and Crenshaw was unusual in one critical respect: the design team was explicitly freed from the residential land planning constraints that typically govern golf course design within community developments. Where most courses are routed to serve residential lot sales — with fairways shaped by lot lines, home placements, and community infrastructure rather than purely by golf design considerations — Anson Point was allowed to find its best routing through 500 acres of natural Lowcountry landscape without subordinating design decisions to real estate economics. The result is a course that feels more like a private golf club surrounded by nature than a golf amenity within a residential development. The course spans approximately 500 acres but maintains only 80 acres of managed turf — a ratio that reflects Coore and Crenshaw's philosophy of minimal intervention with natural landscapes and maximum preservation of the native ecosystems through which the course passes.

Four distinct ecosystems thread through the routing: upland pine forest, maritime forest, live oak groves, and saltwater marshland along the New River. Moving through these four environments across eighteen holes creates a round of unusual ecological variety, with the visual and sensory character of each ecosystem providing natural definition to different sections of the round. The course plays to par 71 at approximately 7,017 yards from the back tees on Tif-Eagle Bermuda greens and Zeon Zoysia fairways. Coore and Crenshaw's design approach, rooted in the ground-game traditions of golf's Scottish origins, emphasizes the texture and character of the ground itself as the primary design element rather than the aerial trajectory of shots over hazards.

The courses that Coore and Crenshaw have produced — Sand Hills in Nebraska, Streamsong, Cabot Links, Bandon Trails — are characterized by naturalistic landforms, flowing ground movement, and an apparent inevitability to the hole routings that suggests the courses were discovered within the landscape rather than imposed upon it. Anson Point joins two existing courses at Palmetto Bluff: the Jack Nicklaus-designed May River Golf Club, which debuted in 2005 and anchors the community's original residential golf offering, and Crossroads, a nine-hole reversible course by the King-Collins design firm of Rob Collins and Tad King that plays as two distinct routings called "The Hammer" and "The Press." Together the three courses give Palmetto Bluff a varied architectural portfolio within a single Lowcountry community — Nicklaus's resort-scale parkland layout, King-Collins's short-form reversible routing, and Coore & Crenshaw's minimal-footprint naturalistic design.