Course Profiles / Kansas
Lawrence Country Club: A Course Profile
On July 24, 1935, Perry Maxwell started work on a golf course in Lawrence, Kansas, and the date matters because Maxwell almost never survives contact with the decades that follow him. Clubs lengthen him, flatten him, plant trees over his lines. Lawrence Country Club is the argument that a club can modernize and keep him anyway. The new 18 hole course opened on May 30, 1936, built under Maxwell's direction on ground the club had just expanded by buying 48 acres, bringing the tract to 128.5 acres. When the club later rebuilt the entire course, it spent nearly 15 months doing it, and the stated goal was to preserve Maxwell's layout. That sentence, preserve the layout, is rarer in American golf than it should be.
The club itself predates Maxwell by a generation. Lawrence Country Club opened in 1914 with nine holes on the hills just north of 6th Street, and it remains the oldest golf course in Lawrence. The 1935 expansion turned a local nine into a full country club course, and Maxwell was a serious hire for a Kansas college town. This was the architect of Southern Hills and Prairie Dunes, a banker turned designer who built greens with interior contour that still embarrasses flatter, newer work. His Kansas footprint is a big reason this club punches into our Kansas state ranking at all, in a state where Prairie Dunes casts a long shadow over everything else.
Rebuilt, nominated, and still Maxwell's
The rebuild story is the second act. The club closed in July 2005 and rebuilt the whole course over nearly 15 months. Full rebuilds are where classic courses usually die politely, reopening with the old name and a generic modern layout underneath. Lawrence took care to preserve Maxwell's layout instead, and Golf Digest noticed, nominating the rebuilt course as one of the top five renovated country club courses in the Midwest region. A Better Billy Bunker renovation followed in 2023, updating the bunker construction without redrawing the course. That sequence, rebuild with restraint in 2005 and 2006, bunker work in 2023, is how a 1936 design stays playable for modern equipment without becoming a tribute act.
What does Maxwell ask of a golfer here? He asks you to read greens. His putting surfaces move from inside, with rolls and shelves that turn a safe approach into a defensive putt if you land on the wrong side. The hills north of 6th Street give the routing its movement, and Maxwell used rises the way he always did, as natural green sites and natural trouble. There are no gimmicks to describe because he did not build gimmicks. He built angles. A drive that leaks to the comfortable side of a fairway leaves the harder second shot. Every Kansas golfer knows a version of this lesson. Maxwell just taught it earlier than most.
The club is private, and it is the only full service, member owned country club in Lawrence. That shapes the golf more than visitors expect. A single club town means the membership is the town's golf establishment, generations of Lawrence families rather than a national roster. Estimates put initiation at full service clubs of this kind in the tens of thousands rather than six figures, and that is an estimate, not a published figure. The point is proportion. This is a serious club with a serious Maxwell course, priced and run for the community it sits in.
The concession is scale. At 128.5 acres, this is a compact property, and modern length pressures a compact Maxwell the way it pressures every classic course under 6,800 yards or so. The club cannot stretch its way out of the equipment era, and it should not try. Its defense was always contour and placement, and those still work on club golfers, which is who the course serves.
Kansas golf talk starts with Prairie Dunes and usually ends there. Lawrence Country Club is the quieter exhibit, a 1914 club that hired Perry Maxwell in 1935, then spent a 15 month rebuild nearly a century later protecting what he left. That kind of loyalty to a dead architect's drawings is the best thing a club can do, and the course still shows it.