Bacon Park Golf Course

A public Ross design in Savannah's Bacon Park, this 1926 course offers affordable municipal golf amid the live oaks and Spanish moss of the Low Country. The course provides accessible Ross architecture in one of Georgia's most historic cities.

Bacon Park Golf Course stands as Savannah's only municipal golf course and among the historically significant public golf facilities in Georgia — a Donald Ross design originally commissioned as part of a sweeping 72-hole municipal scheme for the city, extensively restored beginning in 2014 to return the layout to the condition Ross envisioned when he surveyed the Bacon Park property in the mid-1920s. The course's origins lie in an ambitious civic plan. In 1925, Donald Ross — then at the height of his practice and working across Florida and the Southeast on dozens of commissions — routed four courses for the City of Savannah in a comprehensive municipal golf program. Of those four 18-hole designs, two were built and put into play. The second of the two original Ross municipal courses in Savannah eventually closed around 1940, leaving Bacon Park as the survivor of the pair.

The Bacon Park course opened in 1926 on city-owned land at Bacon Park, a multi-purpose recreational facility in Savannah. Ross's design for the property followed his characteristic principles: strategic bunkering placed to define the optimal angles into the greens, contoured green complexes that reward accurate approach play from specific positions, and a routing that used the natural topography of the park without imposing undue artificial character on the landscape. The course as built occupied the Bacon Park property that the city had dedicated to recreational use. In 1985, an additional nine holes were added to the original 18-hole Ross design, expanding Bacon Park to a 27-hole facility. The expansion reflected growing demand for public golf in Savannah but inevitably added holes in a different era and with a different design sensibility from Ross's Golden Age work.

By 2014, all 27 holes had deteriorated to a degree that required comprehensive intervention. The management contract for the course was awarded to OC Welch Golf Properties that year, and Welch undertook what the firm described as the most comprehensive golf renovation in Savannah's history. Richard Mandell, a Pinehurst-based golf course architect with extensive experience restoring Golden Age designs, was engaged to lead the work. Mandell located Ross's original masterplan and individual hole drawings for the course, as well as aerial photographs from the 1950s and 1970s, which allowed the restoration team to document what the original design had looked like before decades of drift and modification. The restoration by Mandell and the Welch team earned the 2016 Renovation of the Year award in the public course category from Golf Inc. Magazine — a recognition that reflects the significance and quality of the work. OC Welch Golf Properties invested more than $8 million in the golf course and facilities, returning the original 18-hole Ross design to its documented original condition and redesigning the nine-hole addition with a sensibility appropriate to the historic context. Today Bacon Park Golf Course operates as a 27-hole public facility managed by OC Welch Golf Properties under a contract with the City of Savannah. The restored Ross design gives Savannah's public golfers access to a documented Golden Age layout on property that has served the city's golf community continuously since 1926 — a nearly century-long record of public-access golf on among the historically significant municipal courses in the state.