Augusta Country Club

Augusta Country Club is one of the oldest clubs in the South, sitting directly adjacent to Augusta National Golf Club along the banks of Rega Creek. Its Donald Ross–designed course has quietly hosted top amateur events for over a century.

Augusta Country Club predates its famous neighbor across Rae's Creek by more than three decades. The club's roots reach back to 1897, when the Bon Air Golf Club — named for the Bon Air Hotel that served as a center of Augusta's winter social season — laid out a rudimentary nine-hole course with sand putting greens on land that forms the Hill Course the club still plays today. By 1899 the organization had been formally documented at the Richmond County Courthouse, and in 1900 it was rebranded the Country Club of Augusta before adopting its current name in 1921. The club expanded to eighteen holes in 1901, and by 1909 a Lake Course was added through the initiative of club president William Harrison and professional David Ogilvie, giving the membership two full layouts across two distinct sections of the property. The Hill Course development during this period benefited from visits by American presidents William Taft and Warren Harding, both of whom played the Augusta links and whose patronage added social cachet to the club's competitive standing in the region.

Golf in Augusta was growing rapidly, and the Country Club served as its primary institutional home. Donald Ross's involvement with Augusta Country Club came in 1927, when he was commissioned to convert the Hill Course's sand putting surfaces to grass — a transition that was still being completed at many Southern courses in that era. Ross took the opportunity to do more than simply replace the putting surfaces: he re-routed the front nine and re-bunkered the entire layout, applying the strategic principles and green contour work that defined his mature style. The combination of the original 1897 routing revised through Roe's 1909 improvements and then refined by Ross in 1927 produced a course that retained historical depth while meeting twentieth-century design standards. The Lake Course was eventually sold following the Great Depression, leaving the Hill Course as the club's surviving layout and its primary competitive venue.

That decision preserved one of Georgia's most historically significant golf properties: the Hill Course, with its views across Rae's Creek toward Augusta National, hosted the Titleholders Championship — once known as the Women's Masters — for thirty years, from 1937 through the tournament's final edition in 1966 and again in 1972. The first three championships were won by Patty Berg, and the tournament's roster of champions over thirty years encompasses the most significant figures in women's professional golf history: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Louise Suggs, Kathy Whitworth, and many others. During Masters week, members of Augusta Country Club regularly hear the roars from Augusta National through the trees, and the second hole of the Hill Course actually plays across Rae's Creek — the same creek that defines the twelfth and thirteenth holes at Augusta National. In 2002, architect Brian Silva undertook a restoration of the Hill Course using Donald Ross's original hole-by-hole sketches and field notes. Silva rebuilt the greens, squaring them off and following Ross's contour specifications, recreated grass-face coffin bunkers in configurations perpendicular to the line of play, and revived a punchbowl green at the short par-four sixteenth that had been lost through decades of modification.

The restored course opened in January 2002, giving the membership the closest approximation to Ross's 1927 design that modern construction methods could deliver. Augusta Country Club today maintains the Hill Course as one of the few surviving links between Augusta's pre-Masters golf history and the game as it is played today.