Birmingham Country Club

Birmingham Country Club was founded in 1916 with the first nine holes designed by Tom Bendelow, hosting the 1953 PGA Championship won by Walter Burkemo and the 1968 U.S. Women's Amateur. The course was subsequently refined by Donald Ross and Robert Trent Jones Sr., making it one of metropolitan Detroit's most historically significant private clubs.

Birmingham Country Club in Birmingham, Michigan, was founded in 1916 when six local businessmen purchased a 161-acre farm featuring rolling land with trees, hills, valleys, and a winding stream. Their original intention had been a real estate development, but the natural beauty of the site persuaded them to build a golf course instead. Thomas Bendelow designed the first nine holes in 1916, with a second nine following in 1920. Wilfred Reid and William Connellan redesigned the course in the 1920s, refining the layout that Bendelow had established. Thomas Bendelow was a prolific golf architect of the early twentieth century, a Scottish immigrant who designed courses across the country during the first two decades of the 1900s.

His work at Birmingham came during his most productive period, and the site — with its rolling terrain threaded by a winding stream — gave him the natural building blocks his designs consistently exploited. Birmingham Country Club hosted the 1953 PGA Championship, the 35th playing of the event, held July 1 through 7 at the club's grounds in Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb northwest of Detroit. Local resident Walter Burkemo won the match play championship, defeating Felice Torza 2 and 1 in the 36-hole final match. The winner's share was $5,000. Burkemo was the club professional at Franklin Hills Country Club, just six miles from the championship site — a detail that added local flavor to one of American golf's more dramatic major finals.

The 1953 PGA Championship was Burkemo's only major title, sandwiched between his runner-up finishes to Sam Snead in 1951 and Chick Harbert in 1954. The PGA Championship's presence confirmed that the Bendelow-designed and subsequently refined course met the championship standards demanded by the PGA of America, placing the club in the company of America's most significant golf venues for that era. Birmingham Country Club also hosted the 1968 U.S. Women's Amateur, further demonstrating the versatility and quality of the course across competitive formats. The club sits at the center of one of the country's great collections of historic courses, with neighbors including the Donald Ross-designed Oakland Hills, Bloomfield Hills Country Club, and Franklin Hills in the Oakland County area.

In 2014, the club began a multi-year renovation led by architect Bruce Hepner that included a complete course redesign, new irrigation and drainage systems, bunker additions and renovations, and complete changes in turf varieties. The renovation cleared trees, expanded greens, and accentuated the early twentieth-century architectural character that Bendelow and his successors had established across more than a century of the course's history. Hepner's approach — honoring the historical design language while addressing modern playability and maintenance demands — followed the restoration methodology that has become standard for historic clubs of Birmingham's vintage. The renovation restored the visual openness of the original farm landscape that had persuaded the founders to choose golf over real estate more than a century earlier.