Bedford Springs Hotel Golf Course

Tucked into a narrow Allegheny Mountain valley in south-central Pennsylvania, Bedford Springs features a dramatically scenic Ross layout where holes play along Shobers Run and through dense hardwood forests. The restored course is a standout visually striking Ross design in the Mid-Atlantic.

The Bedford Springs Hotel Golf Course in Bedford, Pennsylvania carries one of the longest and most historically significant golf histories in the Commonwealth — a course whose origins date to 1895 and whose development involved three of the most important figures in American golf architecture: A.W. Tillinghast, Donald Ross, and the restoration team of Ron Forse and Jim Nagle, whose comprehensive rebuilding returned the course to championship condition in the twenty-first century. The resort itself predates the golf course by decades, with Bedford Springs occupying a site whose mineral springs drew visitors from the earliest years of the American republic, making it one of the oldest resort destinations in the eastern United States and a property with an unbroken history of genteel recreation dating to the antebellum era. The golf heritage at Bedford Springs dates to 1895, when the resort commissioned landscape architect Spencer Oldham to create a challenging 18-hole course alongside the historic hotel.The mountain setting of south-central Pennsylvania, where the Allegheny ridges and valleys of Bedford County frame the historic springs resort, provided the natural terrain that gave the Oldham course its visual character and topographic variety. In 1912, A.W. Tillinghast was retained by the hotel to rethink the golf program. Tillinghast — who would go on to design Winged Foot, Baltusrol, Bethpage Black, and San Francisco Golf Club — was at an early stage in his architectural career when he came to Bedford Springs, and his work here reduced the course to nine holes while introducing distinctive par-three and bunkering concepts. The Tillinghast holes became memorable enough to be recalled by name a century later, demonstrating the design quality that the young architect brought even to this early resort commission in the Pennsylvania mountains. In 1923, the resort engaged Donald Ross to restore the course to its full 18-hole configuration. Ross — already established as the premier golf course architect in the United States — completed the restoration using existing corridors where they suited his aims, added new holes along Shober's Run to complete an 18-hole sequence, and re-graded greens and surrounds to the firmer, more intricately contoured targets typical of his mature 1920s work. The Ross redesign combined surviving Tillinghast elements with new holes reflecting the strategic sophistication of Ross's prime period, creating a resort course of genuine quality in the mountain setting. The course fell into disrepair during the mid-twentieth century before its revival. In 2006-2007, golf course architects Ron Forse and Jim Nagle undertook a comprehensive restoration that rebuilt every hole while retaining the best design elements of the Tillinghast-Ross legacy. The Forse-Nagle restoration returned the Bedford Springs course to championship condition appropriate to the resort's historical standing, preserving the par-three and bunkering elements that Tillinghast introduced in 1912 and the strategic corridor character that Ross established in 1923. The restored course plays across the mountain terrain of Bedford County, with Shober's Run and the Allegheny highlands providing the scenic and strategic setting that have made Bedford Springs one of Pennsylvania's most historically significant resort golf destinations for more than 130 years of continuous operation.