Town Rankings / South Carolina

The Best Golf Courses in Aiken

Aiken was built for people who arrived with horses, dogs, and time. The Winter Colony came south by train, and golf came with them. That is why a town this size holds a club founded in 1892 and a public course from 1912 within a short drive of each other, and why the Masters, half an hour away in Augusta, has always spilled over into these streets in April.

Aiken golf is classic golf at human scale. Nothing here is long by modern standards. The tests are greens, angles, and firm ground, the kind of golf the Winter Colony wanted after a morning with the horses. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Aiken splits that argument in an interesting way: the best course is private, the best value in American golf might be its neighbour, and the locals are lucky enough to argue about both.

1Palmetto Golf Club

Palmetto, founded in 1892, is one of America's oldest golf clubs, and its card carries two names that settle most arguments before they start: H.H. Barker, who laid out the early course, and Alister MacKenzie, who reworked it in 1932 while building Augusta National nearby. MacKenzie in town, at the peak of his powers, working on a members' course in a winter colony. That is not a marketing line. That is the record.

The course is a classic, short by modern standards, with severe greens that do the defending yardage used to do. Bobby Jones and Masters guests historically played Palmetto during Masters week, which tells you what good golfers thought of it when Augusta was right there. The club sits in Aiken's winter colony historic district, private, discreet, with costs in a high estimate tier and no published numbers to quote.

The concession is obvious: most golfers reading this will never play it, and its test, at classic length, will not stretch a strong modern player the way a 7,400 yard championship course does. Fair. But a ranking that put anything else in Aiken above a MacKenzie rework from 1932 would be lying about what it values. Palmetto is No. 1, and it is not close.

2The Aiken Golf Club

Here is the neighbour, and what a neighbour. The Aiken Golf Club dates to 1912, designed by John Inglis, built for Winter Colony visitors with a lineage to the old Highland Park Hotel course. It is public, downtown, and plays at very low local rates. The hook on this town calls it Palmetto's $25 neighbour, and while prices move, the spirit of that number is the point: one of the best value rounds in the country, a short walk from one of its most private clubs.

Owner Jim McNair Jr. restored the course through the 1990s and 2000s back to its classic character, and the result is short, walkable, firm and fast golf that asks for placement instead of power. Golfers who love old architecture praise it in terms usually reserved for courses that cost ten times as much.

The concession: it is short, it is modest in presentation, and if your idea of quality is a manicured resort operation, this will read as plain. That plainness is the point, though. Aiken Golf Club is the rare public course that kept its soul, and on value alone it could argue for the top spot. It loses only because Palmetto's ceiling is higher.

3Forest Hills Golf Club Aiken

Forest Hills fills out the list as Aiken's third option, and candor requires saying the record behind this entry is thin compared with the two courses above it. What we can say plainly is where it sits in the town's pecking order: behind a MacKenzie touched private classic and behind one of America's best loved public courses, which is a hard neighbourhood for any third course in a small town.

Its role is the everyday one. Aiken golfers need rounds that do not require a member host or a special occasion, and a town with this much golf traffic, swelling every April, needs capacity beyond two headline names. Forest Hills provides that, and there is no shame in being the working course in a town whose top two are exceptional.

Still, rankings are rankings. Play Palmetto if the invitation ever comes. Play the Aiken Golf Club every other day of the trip, twice if you can, because at its price the second round is the easiest decision in South Carolina golf. A town where the public course is the one visitors talk about on the drive home has its priorities exactly right.