Town Rankings / Pennsylvania

The Best Golf Courses in Flourtown

Flourtown is a small place on the Wissahickon Creek, northwest of Philadelphia, and its golf reputation is wildly out of proportion to its size. One club owns the whole conversation. The Philadelphia Cricket Club has its cricket and its tennis elsewhere in the city, but its golf lives here, on two courses that sit a short walk apart and could hardly argue with each other more politely.

That makes this a strange ranking to write and an easy one to defend. There are two anchors and they belong to the same club, so the fight is intramural: a restored Golden Age course with a championship record against the modern second course built to take the pressure off it. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it takes to get on. On those terms, there is no real suspense at the top.

1Philadelphia Cricket Club Wissahickon Course

The Wissahickon Course is A.W. Tillinghast, restored by Keith Foster, and that pairing explains almost everything about why it wins. Tillinghast in the Philadelphia suburbs is not a trivia fact. It is a style of examination: bunkers placed where a confident player wants to be, greens that punish the lazy side of the hole, par threes that ask a question and then wait, unbothered, for your answer. Foster's restoration work gave that examination its edges back, the way restorations at their best do, by removing what decades of softening had added and trusting the original to still be hard enough. It was.

The championship record backs the architecture. The course has hosted PGA Tour golf and the Senior Players Championship, which means two very different fields, the best players in the world and the best older players in the world, were both sent out on it and neither treated it as a pushover. Senior fields in particular find out a course. They have seen everything, they say what they think, and a course that survives them with its reputation intact is usually exactly as good as advertised.

The concession is access, and it is not a small one. This is a private club with a long memory and no interest in your weekend plans. Estimates put initiation well into six figures, and it is an estimate because clubs like this do not publish numbers. If you never get the invitation, the Wissahickon remains a rumour with a scorecard. But a ranking of golf is a ranking of golf. The best course in Flourtown is one of the best courses in Pennsylvania, full stop.

2Philadelphia Cricket Club Militia Hill Course

Militia Hill is the club's second course, the modern one, built on more open ground and asked to do a different job. Where Wissahickon tests precision, Militia Hill tests length and nerve over a bigger piece of property. It is the course members play when they want room to swing, and visiting players often walk off it saying they had more fun there, which is a real thing and not nothing. Fun is a legitimate category. It just is not the top category here.

The honest case for Militia Hill at No. 1 is the day itself: more space, less history pressing on every tee shot, a round that feels like golf rather than an exam. The case against is that when both courses belong to the same club, the second course is always being compared, on the drive home, to the first. Wissahickon's restored Tillinghast holes are the ones people describe a week later. Militia Hill gets described that evening.

So Flourtown ends where it started, with one club holding both spots and the order between them settled by architecture and record rather than by mood. Two courses, one gate, and inside the gate a restored Tillinghast that most towns in America would trade their whole list for.