Old Town Club

Old Town Club is a masterful Perry Maxwell design in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, set on 165 acres of the former R.J. Reynolds Estate. The course is celebrated for Maxwell's naturalistic shaping, rippling greens, and width-based strategic design, further refined by a 2013 Coore & Crenshaw restoration.

The origins of Old Town Club lie in the intersection of tobacco wealth, Augusta National connections, and the genius of an Oklahoma-born golf course architect who understood terrain better than perhaps any designer of his era. In 1938, Charlie and Mary Reynolds Babcock -- scions of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco family -- set out to establish a private golf club on a portion of the family's 1,003-acre estate known as "Reynolda" in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The impetus was partly personal and partly practical: a handful of members at the nearby Forsyth Country Club had grown frustrated with that club's expanding membership, and the Babcocks saw an opportunity to create something more intimate. The connection to Augusta National proved decisive in shaping the course. Charlie Babcock's New York investment firm, Reynolds & Company, employed a particular business associate named Clifford Roberts -- the co-founder and long-serving chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club. Roberts had recently overseen the hiring of Perry Maxwell to redesign the greens at Augusta National, work that produced the famed contours on holes like the 10th, 14th, and 16th that remain largely intact today. Delighted with Maxwell's results at Augusta, Roberts urged Babcock to engage the same architect for the new course at Reynolda. Maxwell arrived in Winston-Salem and was given free rein to select the most suitable 165 acres from the Babcocks' vast estate. He chose a former horse farm whose natural topography -- a succession of ridges, knolls, swales, and ravines moving across hilly but walkable terrain -- struck him as ideal for golf. Construction commenced on December 6, 1938, and Maxwell's 18-hole, par-70 design opened for play in November 1939.

It would prove to be one of the last and most brilliant expressions of Golden Age golf architecture. Maxwell left the topography largely undisturbed, routing his holes to take full advantage of the land's natural contours rather than imposing his will upon them. Bill Coore, who would later restore the course, has described Old Town's routing as essential study for any serious student of golf course architecture. The holes move in every direction across the property, ascending ridgelines and descending into valleys, with each hole presenting a distinct character shaped by the terrain it occupies. Ben Crenshaw, Coore's design partner, has said of Old Town that "it's the best land I've ever seen for golf." Maxwell's greens are the course's signature feature. Known for the rolling contours that architects and golfers have come to call "Maxwell rolls" or "Maxwell puffs," these putting surfaces incorporate steep internal undulations, dramatic false fronts, and subtle ridges that divide greens into distinct sections. Misread the contour by even a small degree and a birdie putt becomes a scramble for par. The greens at Old Town are among the finest surviving examples of Maxwell's craft, which also produced the putting surfaces at Prairie Dunes, Southern Hills, and Crystal Downs. The most remarkable feature of the layout is the double green shared by the 8th and 17th holes, which serves as the visual and strategic focal point of the course's northwestern quadrant. During construction, Clifford Roberts himself visited the site and encouraged Maxwell to merge the adjacent greens into a single expansive putting surface -- a concept inspired by the seven double greens at the Old Course at St Andrews. The result was a bold, undulating green that provides a wealth of pin positions and creates a social gathering point where players on different holes share the same stage.

It is believed to be Perry Maxwell's only surviving double green. For decades after its opening, Old Town operated quietly as a small private club whose significance was appreciated primarily by those who played it and by the Wake Forest University golfers who were fortunate enough to call it their home course. The club has served as the official home course of Wake Forest golf for generations, and the list of Demon Deacons who sharpened their games on Maxwell's slopes reads like a roster of professional golf's greatest names. Arnold Palmer played his collegiate golf at Wake Forest in the late 1940s and early 1950s, winning medalist honors at Old Town in 1949. Lanny Wadkins, who would go on to win the 1977 PGA Championship and accumulate 33 professional titles, was fond of saying that "Old Town offers so many varied lies that it is the best proving ground for training serious young golfers." Curtis Strange, winner of back-to-back U.S. Opens, Jay Haas, Webb Simpson, and Jennifer Kupcho all developed their games on these fairways. Palmer, Wadkins, Strange, Haas, and Simpson have been granted honorary memberships in recognition of their connection to the club. By the early 2000s, Old Town's brilliance had been partially obscured by decades of tree growth. Planting and natural encroachment had narrowed fairways, eliminated ground-game options, and diminished the strategic width that Maxwell had built into his design. The course's architectural community recognized the latent quality beneath the canopy, and in 2013 the club engaged Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to lead a comprehensive restoration. The Coore-Crenshaw work was transformative.

Hundreds of trees were removed to reopen playing corridors, restore sightlines, and reveal the extraordinary topography that Maxwell had so carefully incorporated. Fairways grew from 35 acres to approximately 60 acres, closely matching the scale visible in a 1939 aerial photograph of the newly opened course. Native areas were reintroduced to add texture and visual contrast to the hilly terrain. Most significantly, the restoration addressed the double green at the 8th and 17th holes: Coore enlarged the shared putting surface from 8,200 to 16,700 square feet, restoring it to a scale that more faithfully evoked its St Andrews inspiration and Maxwell's original intent. The results propelled Old Town Club into national and international recognition. The course has risen steadily in major rankings, earning a place on Golf Magazine's Top 100 Courses in the World list -- a remarkable achievement for a club that had operated in relative obscurity for most of its existence. The course measures just over 7,000 yards from the back tees, but the rolling terrain, Maxwell's deceptive greens, and the constant need to assess slopes and lies make it play far more demanding than its modest length suggests. Old Town remains a walking course, as Maxwell intended, with no cart paths intruding on the natural landscape. For Perry Maxwell, working on superlative terrain with the encouragement of his Augusta National connections, Old Town was a culminating masterwork -- a course that sat quietly for decades, waiting for the right stewards to strip away the overgrowth and reveal what had been there all along.