Barton Hills Country Club

Carved into the Huron River valley in Ann Arbor, Barton Hills features dramatic elevation changes and some of the most challenging green complexes in Ross's portfolio. The course is consistently ranked among the top courses in Michigan, with its river-valley setting providing a stunning backdrop for strategic, demanding golf.

Barton Hills Country Club in Ann Arbor, Michigan was founded in 1919 by local businessmen who purchased 164 acres of former farm and orchard land in the rolling hills just outside the city. The founders intended to create a private club offering golf, tennis, and recreational activities appropriate to Ann Arbor's professional and academic community. Donald Ross was engaged to design the golf course, which he supervised personally during construction and opened for play in 1922. Ross's design at Barton Hills reflected his characteristic approach to rolling wooded terrain — a routing that used the natural topography of the Ann Arbor hills to create varied elevation changes, fairway corridors defined by mature woodland, and the contoured greens and strategic bunkering that defined his mature design philosophy.

The 164-acre property gave Ross enough land to work with the terrain intelligently, producing a course that felt natural rather than imposed on its landscape. The course has been shaped by multiple architects over its century of operation. William Diddel made early modifications in 1952, followed by Bill Newcomb and John F. Robinson in 1972, and Arthur Hills in 1994.

Ron Prichard completed the most recent significant work in 2012, bringing the restoration sensibility he had developed across numerous New England and Midwest Ross projects to the task of recovering the design intent that successive modifications had partially obscured. Barton Hills Country Club has hosted notable competitive events throughout its history, including the Michigan Open and the Western Junior Championship. The club's association with the University of Michigan community — Ann Arbor's dominant institutional presence — has given it a distinctive membership character drawn from the academic, medical, and professional communities clustered around one of the country's most significant public research universities. During World War II, the club's golf course served as an airfield for training military pilots — a dramatic repurposing of the fairway corridors that Ross had designed for golf, and a reflection of the national emergency that transformed American institutions across every sector.

The course returned to golf after the war and has continued its operation through the postwar decades, the academic expansion of the 1960s and 1970s, and the present era of the university city. After more than a century, Barton Hills Country Club continues to provide private golf on the Donald Ross course that has defined its identity since 1922.