Interlachen Country Club

When the six founding members of Interlachen purchased the site’s 146 acres for $12,000 from a local farmer in 1909, they did so with gold, traveling the last two miles through heavy snow to the farmhouse and delivering the fee by hand. With the farmer nervous about carrying that much gold, they guarded the house with loaded shotguns until the banks opened in the morning. 

The site of that farmhouse was close to today’s 12th hole — one of the many extraordinary sections of the site — and perhaps a good omen for what was to come. The club hired Scottish architect William Watson to build the golf course and it opened for play the next year. A decade after the course was built, the club hired Donald Ross to carry out a redesign. Ross worked to maximize the rolling property by moving green pads to high points and cutting bunkers into slopes. The course reopened in 1921. Subsequently, the club brought in Willie Kid to do some updates before hosting Bobby Jones’s 1930 U.S. Open win, the third leg of his grand slam-winning season. 

The club’s respect for Ross’s design has remained fairly steadfast through the years. When Robert Trent Jones was hired in 1959 after the club had been invited to host another U.S. Open, his plans for a significant overhaul were rejected, and his work was limited to the first and third greens. Geoffrey Cornish and Brian Silva completed projects in the 1980s and 2000s, respectively, with the intention of “restoring” Ross features.

Interlachen is clever in how it works its way through the terrain. Some holes — like the second, third, 12th, and 13th — work up and then off slopes, while others — such as the fourth, sixth, and 18th — engage with interesting landforms off the tee, so that mishits can quickly get pushed into awkward low spots. 

In 2024, Andrew Green completed the most extensive project to date at the club, rebuilding every bunker and pushing greens out to the edges of their pads, using Ross’s original sketches to “reconnect with as much of the Ross character” as possible. The greens were given more “squared-off” shapes — a feature of many Ross sketches — bringing green edges closer to bunkers as well as recapturing some interesting corner pin positions. Another significant goal of the project was to open up the site, which was initially a mostly treeless tract of farmland. Instead of clear-cutting, though, Green and the club kept certain large specimen trees and strategically removed others, restoring sightlines while allowing the remaining trees to frame holes and amplify the scale of the site.

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