Peachtree Golf Club

Bobby Jones wanted to build a course as close to Augusta National as possible — and better if he could manage it. Working with Robert Trent Jones Sr. on 240 rolling acres in northeast Atlanta, he opened Peachtree in 1948 with the longest championship tees and largest greens in America. No tournament has ever brought cameras here, which is exactly how the 225 members prefer it.

Peachtree Golf Club is Bobby Jones's final architectural legacy — the course he conceived, co-designed, and personally guided through construction as the ultimate expression of his convictions about what golf should feel like, built in Atlanta in the late 1940s with Robert Trent Jones Sr. as his design partner and immediate acclaim as among the top courses in the American South. Jones founded Peachtree in 1947, reportedly out of frustration with slow play at East Lake and a desire to create a new club with a different membership culture — one that emphasized the game itself rather than the social conventions that had come to characterize East Lake's operation. Jones identified a tract of land in what was then an unincorporated area north of Atlanta, on a former plantation property that included mature hardwood trees, rolling terrain, and a two-story brick plantation house built in 1857 that became the nucleus of the club's clubhouse. He selected members personally, with some joining specifically because Jones had asked them. The collaboration between Bobby Jones and Robert Trent Jones Sr. was one of the more consequential partnerships in mid-twentieth-century American golf course architecture. Bobby Jones brought twenty-five years of playing experience at the highest levels of the game — including thirteen major championships, won across a career of extraordinary brevity and brilliance before his retirement at age twenty-eight in 1930 — and an architect's instinct for what made a golf hole strategically compelling. Robert Trent Jones brought the technical knowledge of a trained course designer who had built his reputation on projects across the East Coast.

Their collaboration produced a course that was immediately recognized as the finest private layout in Atlanta and among the technically accomplished designs in the postwar South. Peachtree Golf Club opened officially in 1948 and was hailed as a masterpiece by the professional and amateur golfing community. Robert Trent Jones later credited Bobby Jones's influence with sending his own career to the forefront of American course design — the attention the Peachtree commission attracted helped establish Trent Jones as the dominant designer of the next decade, leading directly to his commissions at Spyglass Hill, Baltusrol, and dozens of other celebrated courses. The course plays to a par of 72 and stretches to roughly 7,390 yards from the back tees, with a routing that uses the gently rolling terrain of the Atlanta Piedmont to create a sequence of holes with exceptional variety and strategic depth. Bobby Jones designed with the conviction that every hole should present a clear risk-reward choice and that the ideal golf course would reward intelligent play as consistently as it rewarded powerful striking. Greens at Peachtree are expansive and multi-tiered by the standards of their era, with contours that create multiple distinct pin positions and demand approach precision to access favorable sections of the putting surface. The club has operated as a members-only private facility since its founding, maintaining the intimate character that Jones intended.

It does not host professional or USGA championships and maintains no meaningful public profile — a deliberate posture consistent with Jones's founding vision of a club built for the pleasure of its members rather than for external recognition. Peachtree appears consistently in Golf Digest's national rankings of private courses, typically holding a position in the top 25 to 30 in the country, and ranks as one of the top two or three private courses in Georgia. It stands as the most direct physical expression of Bobby Jones's architectural convictions — a course that reflects, in its every strategic dimension, what the greatest amateur golfer in American history believed the game should demand and reward. The course plays to a par of 72 and stretches to roughly 7,390 yards from the back tees — extremely long for its era — with a routing that uses the gently rolling terrain of the Atlanta Piedmont to create a sequence of holes with exceptional variety and strategic depth.

Greens at Peachtree are among the largest and most multi-tiered of their era, with contours that create multiple distinct pin positions and demand approach precision to access favorable sections of the putting surface. The club has operated as a members-only private facility since its founding, maintaining the intimate character that Jones intended, with a membership limited to just 225 individuals. It does not host professional or USGA championships. Peachtree appears consistently in Golf Digest's national rankings, typically holding a position in the top 25 to 30 in the country, and ranks as one of the top two or three private courses in Georgia.