Plainfield Country Club

Gil Hanse's meticulous 2019 restoration stripped away decades of accumulated changes to reveal the Donald Ross layout underneath — and the PGA of America noticed, awarding Plainfield the 2025 PGA Championship. Ross's crowned greens and strategic angles are back to their original contours, and the course finally plays the way its architect intended a century ago.

Plainfield Country Club traces its origins to 1890, when a group of sporting enthusiasts in central New Jersey organized a club initially devoted to tennis and other outdoor pursuits. The club predates the great wave of American golf club formation that swept the Northeast in the mid-1890s, making it among the oldest continuously operating country clubs in the United States. Golf arrived at Plainfield in 1898, when architect Tom Bendelow laid out a modest 5,239-yard course on the club's existing property. For nearly two decades, members played this rudimentary layout, but the club's ambitions grew as golf's popularity surged across America in the early twentieth century. In 1916, Plainfield purchased sixty acres of rolling farmland on the southeastern edge of its property and hired Donald Ross to lengthen the Bendelow course. Ross, the Dornoch-born architect who had already established himself as America's foremost course designer, visited the site and immediately recognized something far more promising than a simple expansion. He spent two days walking the terrain and convinced the club's leadership to abandon the old layout entirely and build a completely new eighteen-hole course. The property encompassed seven small hills -- the very "Short Hills" where Continental and British forces clashed during the Battle of Short Hills in June 1777 during the American Revolutionary War. Ross saw in this undulating landscape an ideal canvas for strategic golf architecture, later remarking on "the gently flowing hills, where golf holes can flow across the landscape." World War I delayed construction, and Ross's new course did not open for play until September 1921.Ross routed the front nine descending from the clubhouse, which sits atop the property's highest point, while the back nine gradually climbs back up, creating a natural rhythm that rewards endurance and strategic thinking in equal measure. Ross's design philosophy at Plainfield emphasized width and angles over brute length. His fairways were often fifty yards across, but certain sides provided more favorable lines of play depending on the pin position. Ross conceived the course as a form of chess or sailing -- a game of tacking and positioning rather than sheer power off the tee. The course's most distinctive architectural feature is its dramatically contoured green complexes. Seven of the eighteen greens are perched atop knolls, a hallmark of Ross's work that demands precise distance control and rewards a deft short game. The greens slide, twist, and turn, with many sloping from back to front and featuring sharp dropoffs at the rear. Ross crafted subtle shelves and tucked pin positions that favor different angles of attack, ensuring that the ideal line off the tee changes based on the day's hole location. His bunkers intrude along the fronts and flanks of the greens, creating small outlying portions of putting surface on the periphery that tempt aggressive play while punishing imprecision. The par-three 11th hole stands as perhaps Donald Ross's finest short hole anywhere in America. Playing at just 148 yards, the hole features a green of less than 4,000 square feet that slopes severely uphill from front to back. Contour mapping by longtime superintendent Travis Pauley indicates an average pitch of more than eight percent across the entire surface. A dramatic false front rejects any approach that arrives without sufficient carry, sending the ball tumbling back down the slope. When the wind blows, which it often does on this exposed hilltop setting, the 11th becomes a puzzle that even the best professionals struggle to solve. The 12th hole offers another masterclass in Ross's green design -- a well-defended and cleverly contoured putting surface that challenges players to consider their approach angle from the moment they step onto the tee. The club's rich championship history began in earnest with the 1978 U.S. Amateur, won by John Cook, who navigated Plainfield's demanding green complexes to claim the title. In 1987, the club hosted the U.S. Women's Open, where Laura Davies emerged victorious in the event's first-ever three-person playoff, a dramatic conclusion that showcased Plainfield's ability to produce thrilling competitive golf. The club also made a significant early contribution to the game's governance: Leighton Calkins, who served as club president from 1908 to 1914, developed the initial USGA handicap system that was adopted in 1911. Calkins is also credited with coining the term "par" as it is understood in modern golf. By the late twentieth century, decades of tree planting had fundamentally altered the character of Ross's design. Dense corridors of mature hardwoods narrowed fairways, obscured sightlines, and provided depth perception cues that ran counter to Ross's original philosophy of open, strategic golf. In the late 1990s, the club engaged architect Gil Hanse to develop a comprehensive master plan for restoring the course to its original Ross character. The restoration proceeded in careful phases over more than two decades, a deliberate approach that allowed the club to remain in play throughout the process while ensuring each intervention was guided by historical evidence. Plainfield possessed an invaluable archive: original Donald Ross plans, including full course layouts and hole-by-hole diagrams, supplemented by a collection of aerial photographs from the course's early years. Hanse's work, completed in 2015, transformed Plainfield back into the open, strategic layout Ross had envisioned. The restoration removed more than 1,200 trees from fairways and behind greens, rediscovered lost bunkers that had been covered over by decades of turf encroachment, expanded sixteen greens to recover their original dimensions, and lengthened twelve tees. The post-restoration course stretches to 7,110 yards while retaining its par of 72, a testament to how skillfully Ross's routing accommodates modern championship demands. The removal of trees restored sweeping views across the property and reintroduced the optical illusions and strategic dilemmas that Ross had built into his original design. The restored Plainfield quickly returned to the national championship stage. The PGA Tour's Barclays tournament visited in both 2011 and 2015, with the latter event showcasing the fully restored course to a national television audience. The USGA recognized Plainfield's championship credentials by awarding the club the 2025 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball, the 2031 U.S. Senior Women's Open, and the 2038 U.S. Senior Open, ensuring that this historic New Jersey club will remain a fixture in American championship golf for decades to come. Today, Plainfield Country Club stands as a shining example of how thoughtful restoration can honor an architect's original vision while meeting the demands of the modern game, its seven hills and artful green complexes continuing to challenge and delight golfers more than a century after Donald Ross first walked the land.