Barnsley Resort Golf Course

Barnsley Resort's golf course, known as "The General," is a Jim Fazio design from 1999 routed through the historic 3,000-acre Barnsley estate in the foothills of northwest Georgia, where Champion Bermuda greens and natural terrain create a course that plays to 7,200 yards with a rating of 74.5 and slope of 141 through fairways framed by mature hardwoods and the natural elevation of the Piedmont landscape.

Barnsley Resort Golf Course is an 18-hole Jim Fazio design set on a 3,000-acre estate in the North Georgia foothills near Adairsville, where among the historically layered properties in Georgia has been transformed into a championship golf and resort destination. The course opened in 1999 as the golf centerpiece of the resort development launched by Prince Hubertus Fugger von Babenhausen, who purchased the deteriorated Barnsley estate in 1988 and spent more than a decade restoring the property before opening it to guests. The land's history stretches back to the 1840s, when Godfrey Barnsley — a British-born cotton broker who became one of the wealthiest merchants in the southeastern United States — traveled north from Savannah to the Georgia highlands and purchased three adjacent 160-acre homesteads taken from the Cherokee nation.

Barnsley built Woodlands, his family manor, on the property for his wife Julia, with gardens inspired by the landscape design principles of Andrew Jackson Downing, America's most influential 19th-century landscape architect. The plantation flourished until the Civil War, when Union troops ransacked the house and removed its fixtures. Barnsley lost his fortune in the war's aftermath and died in New Orleans in 1873.

The property passed through successive owners, fell into disrepair, and was struck by a tornado in 1906 that blew off the main house's roof — leaving the Woodlands ruins that are now one of the resort's most distinctive architectural features. Prince Hubertus Fugger, a Bavarian nobleman, acquired the estate in 1988 and invested in stabilizing the ruins and restoring the historic gardens before commissioning Jim Fazio to design the golf course. Fazio produced a rolling 378-acre layout through the estate's forests, around the property's lake, and through terrain shaped by the foothills' natural contours.

The course plays to a par 72 and was named Georgia's top-ranked course by GolfAdvisor.com, reflecting the quality of the design and the spectacular setting. The resort's full facility encompasses cottage lodging, a spa, sporting clays, a fishing lake, and restaurants, with the Barnsley Gardens ruins and historic gardens anchoring the property's identity as a destination resort that combines golf with one of Georgia's most compelling historic sites.