At nearly 4,000 feet in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Cashiers, Tom Fazio let the land do the design work — routing holes through valleys, along ridgelines, and beside waterfalls on 600 acres of pristine Appalachian forest. Named for the Confederate general-turned-governor and opened in 1987, Wade Hampton earned the top residential course ranking in America by looking less like a golf course and more like something discovered in the Carolina highlands.
History
Wade Hampton Golf Club sits at 3,500 feet in elevation in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Cashiers, North Carolina — a Tom Fazio design that opened in 1987 and has appeared continuously in Golf Digest's America's 100 Greatest rankings for nearly four decades, never once dropping out of the top 40 since first being listed. The club's origins lie with developer William McKee, who assembled a 300-acre parcel of pristine mountain terrain in the Jackson County highlands and commissioned Tom Fazio to design a golf course that would exploit the site's extraordinary natural attributes. McKee gave Fazio exceptional freedom in the design process and a budget that allowed for careful, unhurried execution — conditions that produced one of Fazio's most personal and enduring designs. Fazio himself became one of Wade Hampton's founding members, an indication of his personal investment in the project that went beyond the conventional client-architect relationship. The 1987 opening coincided with a moment in Fazio's career when he was still working in close dialogue with existing landscapes rather than imposing the heavily regraded, manicured environments that would characterize some of his later work. Wade Hampton is an exercise in restraint by comparison with the more elaborate Fazio productions that followed.
The routing flows through a natural valley between flanking mountain peaks, using the terrain's existing drainage corridors and ridge lines to create hole shapes with a naturalness that feels earned rather than engineered. Fairways descend from elevated tee positions through stands of rhododendron, mountain laurel, and hardwood trees before opening onto approach areas that offer views of the surrounding ridgelines and, on several holes, distant mountain panoramas of exceptional scale. The course plays to a par of 72 and stretches past 6,900 yards from the back tees at an elevation that, while not as high as some Colorado mountain courses, creates playing conditions of genuine variety: thinner air that extends carries, temperatures that remain cool even in midsummer, afternoon thunderstorms that can transform playing conditions rapidly, and morning mists that burn off as the day progresses to reveal the mountain views that make Wade Hampton among the visually spectacular rounds of golf available in the American East. Fazio designed the greens at Wade Hampton to sit in natural amphitheaters and on ridge positions that exploit the mountain backdrop, with contours that are subtle by the standards of his more technically demanding work but precise enough to create multiple distinct scoring zones on each putting surface. The bunkering uses the course's high-fescue rough and natural terrain features as context, creating hazard areas that blend into the landscape rather than interrupting it with formal sand construction. Wade Hampton Golf Club operates as an invitation-only private club with a membership drawn from across the country — golfers who maintain second homes or seasonal residences in the Cashiers-Highlands plateau community or who belong specifically for the golf experience.
The club does not host professional or USGA championships, which has preserved the intimate, unhurried experience that McKee and Fazio intended when the club was founded. Golf Digest's 2025-26 America's 100 Greatest rankings place Wade Hampton at No. 27 — a position sustained by nearly forty years of consistent evaluation that speaks to the durability of Fazio's mountain masterpiece. Fazio designed the greens at Wade Hampton to sit in natural amphitheaters and on ridge positions that exploit the mountain backdrop, with contours that are subtle by the standards of his more technically demanding work but precise enough to create multiple distinct scoring zones on each putting surface. The bunkering uses the course's high-fescue rough and natural terrain features as context, creating hazard areas that blend into the landscape rather than interrupting it with formal sand construction. Wade Hampton Golf Club operates as an invitation-only private club with a membership drawn from across the country — golfers who maintain second homes or seasonal residences in the Cashiers-Highlands plateau community or who belong specifically for the golf experience. The club does not host professional or USGA championships, which has preserved the intimate, unhurried experience that McKee and Fazio intended when the club was founded.
Fazio mentions Wade Hampton more than any other project in his own book on golf course design, a testament to his personal investment in what many consider his finest work. Golf Digest's 2025-26 America's 100 Greatest rankings place Wade Hampton at No. 27 — a position sustained by nearly forty years of consistent evaluation that speaks to the durability of Fazio's mountain masterpiece. Fazio's routing at Wade Hampton takes full advantage of the property's 1,200-foot elevation and its position within the Cashiers plateau — one of the highest valleys in the eastern United States. The combination of altitude, which adds meaningful carry distance, and the cool temperatures of the southern Appalachian summer produces playing conditions that contrast sharply with the heat and humidity of the lowland courses that many Wade Hampton members play during the rest of the year. The 18th hole, a dramatic downhill par four framed by the mountains that give the club its panoramic backdrop, has become among the photographed finishing holes in American private golf.