Course Profiles / South Carolina
Cheraw State Park Golf Course: A Course Profile
The 13th at Cheraw is a 496 yard par 4 that doglegs left, and at the end of it the green sits protected by Lake Juniper. A par 4 a yard short of 500, bending around state park water, on a course the public can play in the Pee Dee. Holes like that are not supposed to live at state park addresses. This one does, and it is not a fluke of the routing. It is what the whole course is trying to be.
Cheraw State Park Golf Course is one of only two golf courses in the South Carolina state park system. Tom Jackson designed it and it opened in 1992, set in a park the Civilian Conservation Corps developed in 1934 along the shores of Lake Juniper. The course plays par 72 at 7,001 yards, with a 73.6 course rating and a 142 slope. Read those numbers again. That is not a pitch and putt attached to a campground. That is a full championship card, in the Sandhills country of the Pee Dee, in Chesterfield County.
Sandhills ground, park setting
The Sandhills do quiet work for golf. Sandy soil drains, firms up, and gives a course a texture that clay never will. Cheraw uses its ground without dressing it up. The lake is the big feature and Jackson saved its best use for the 13th, deep in the round, where a long hitter standing 2 under his handicap suddenly has to decide how much of the dogleg he believes in. Cut the corner and the lake green becomes reachable in two honest shots. Bail right and the hole becomes very long very fast.
The course is also a Certified Audubon International Wildlife Sanctuary, which at some properties is a plaque and a press release. Here it fits the plain facts of the place. You are playing inside a state park, along a lake the CCC built around, and the golf shares the land rather than clearing it. We score the golf first, then the day, and the day at Cheraw is a park day, quiet in a way resort golf in this state rarely manages. It earns its mention in the 5 best golf courses in South Carolina on the strength of the test and the setting together.
The honest limits
The concession is straightforward. A state park budget is a state park budget. Conditioning will not match the private clubs up the road in the Pinehurst direction or the resort courses on the coast, and golfers who measure a course by its practice facility and clubhouse will underrate this one before they reach the second tee. The 142 slope also means this is no gentle walk for a beginner. The card tells the truth about that too.
Access, though, is as open as golf gets. This is a public course, run by the state, in a park anyone can drive into. Compare that with most of the names on our South Carolina state ranking, where the best golf sits behind gates. Cheraw is the counterweight, proof that the state's public golf is not just a coastal story.
Play the 13th well and you will remember this course longer than richer ones. The lake on your left, the green tucked against it, a long iron in your hands and nobody rushing you from behind. State park golf does not get to keep many moments like that. Cheraw kept one.