# Old Barnwell Golf Club vs. Palmetto Golf Club: The Aiken Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/old-barnwell-golf-club-vs-palmetto-golf-club/

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Course Comparisons / South Carolina


A golf ball beside the hole on a green. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Aiken offers the cleanest old versus new argument in American golf right now. On one side, a club founded in 1892 that Alister MacKenzie reworked while he was building Augusta National just down the road. On the other, a private national club that opened in 2023 on 575 acres of sand and has already been ranked among the top 100 courses in the country. Same town, same sandy soil, 131 years apart. Picking between Old Barnwell and Palmetto is really picking what you think a golf course is: a new argument made brilliantly, or an old one that never stopped being right.

## Palmetto Golf Club

Palmetto's founding date does real work. 1892 puts it among the oldest golf clubs in America, founded when the game in this country was barely a rumor, in Aiken's winter colony historic district, where wealthy northerners once brought their horses and their golf clubs south for the season. The decisive chapter came in 1932, when Alister MacKenzie reworked the course while building Augusta National nearby. MacKenzie's hand is the most valuable signature in golf architecture, and Palmetto carries it in a form Augusta never offers: a walking, member scale course where the design intelligence shows in the greens rather than in the television shots.

Bobby Jones and Masters guests historically played Palmetto during Masters week, which tells you what the sharpest judges of that era thought of it when Augusta itself was right there. The test is classic and, by modern standards, short, with severe greens doing the defending that yardage does not. That is a MacKenzie pattern. Length is the crudest form of difficulty. Contour is the lasting kind.

## Old Barnwell Golf Club

Old Barnwell, designed by Brian Schneider and Blake Conant and founded by Nick Schreiber as a private national club, opened in 2023 and went straight at the same ground with modern means. The site is the headline: 575 acres of sandy soil and rolling hills in longleaf and loblolly pines, room enough that the routing never has to squeeze. Where Palmetto's virtues are compression and green craft, Old Barnwell's are scale and variety, a big property course built for a national membership that flies in and plays repeatedly across a weekend. It has already been ranked No. 71 in the United States on a Top 100 list, and it will host an NCAA Women's Golf Regional on May 10 to 12, 2027 with the University of South Carolina, an early competitive endorsement most new clubs wait a decade for.

## The verdict

Concede the new course its strongest points first. Old Barnwell has the better site by acreage, the modern infrastructure, and the momentum, and for a golfer who wants to see where American private golf is heading, it is the more exciting invitation in Aiken right now. Our [Aiken ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-aiken-sc/) and [the South Carolina state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/) both take its rise seriously.

But the verdict goes to Palmetto, and it is not nostalgia doing the voting. MacKenzie's greens, on a course he touched in the same years he was producing his masterpiece, are a finite resource. There will be more excellent new courses built on Aiken sand. There will never be another MacKenzie rework in a winter colony club where Bobby Jones warmed up for the Masters. Old Barnwell may eventually build a history to rival it. Palmetto already has the thing money and talent cannot manufacture, and its golf, short and severe and clever, still earns the keep. Take the Old Barnwell invitation for the future of the game in Aiken. Take Palmetto for the game itself, as it was designed by one of its two or three greatest minds, an hour from his most famous work and in some ways closer to his heart.

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