Town Rankings / Michigan

The Best Golf Courses in Harbor Springs

Harbor Springs is a summer colony that became a town, tucked under the bluff on Little Traverse Bay, and its golf is old in a way American golf rarely gets to be. Two of the four courses on this list date to the 1890s. One of them still bans carts on most days. The modern game arrived here eventually, as it arrives everywhere, but it had to ask permission from the nineteenth century first, and you can still feel that in the best possible way.

Everything here is private or club based, which is the standing condition of golf in a town built by families who came for ten weeks a year and stayed for five generations. We rank the golf. Access, in Harbor Springs, has never been the point.

1Harbor Point Golf Club

Harbor Point is an 1896 club out on the point, and it still bans carts on most days, which in 2026 is not nostalgia. It is policy, and policy is character. You walk Harbor Point the way its first members walked it, across compact ground above the bay, in wind that comes off Lake Michigan with opinions. The course is short by modern measure and defended the old way: by position, by breeze, by greens that do not need to be enormous to be difficult when the flag is tucked and the air is moving.

The concession is scale. A strong modern player will overpower stretches of Harbor Point, and the conditioning follows a summer colony calendar rather than a tour calendar. None of that moves us. This list scores the golf first and the day second, and no day of golf in Harbor Springs, maybe in northern Michigan, feels more like the game as it was meant to be carried: on foot, at pace, above cold blue water. First, and not on sentiment. On conviction.

2True North Golf Club

True North is the modern answer, a private club in the hills outside town built for the current game: bigger scale, bigger movement, golf as spectacle in the north woods. Where Harbor Point whispers, True North raises its voice, and after a morning walking the point, the contrast is almost the point. Members get both centuries of golf inside one small town.

It ranks second because spectacle is easier to build than soul, and because its drama sometimes works harder than its strategy. But let us concede the other side properly: on pure shot values, hole for hole at modern length, plenty of good judges would flip our top two. We would not call them wrong. We would call it the best argument in Harbor Springs golf, and we land on the walking club with the cart ban.

3Wequetonsing Golf Club

Wequetonsing dates to 1898, in the summer colony across the harbor, and its name alone tells you this is golf from another America. The course serves the cottages of Wequetonsing the way it has for well over a century: as the colony's front yard, where generations learned the game, played the club events, and measured their summers. The golf is gentle, the ground is close to the water, and the whole place runs on continuity.

As a test it finishes third, because gentleness is a limit as well as a charm, and the two courses above ask far more questions. As a piece of living golf history it has no rival in town except the one across the bay. Harbor Springs is lucky to hold both, and this ranking is poorer for having to separate them.

4Birchwood Farms Golf and Country Club

Birchwood Farms is the full service country club of the group, golf as one amenity among several in a large private community in the hills: housing, dining, the whole apparatus of a modern club, with a course that serves its members well across a long summer. It is the Harbor Springs golf most like golf anywhere else in America, which is both its function and its problem on this list.

The course is solid, the setting is handsome, and the membership gets exactly what it joined for. But solid and handsome finish fourth in a town where the competition is an 1896 walking club, a modern spectacle, and an 1898 colony course. Birchwood is a fine place to belong. It is simply playing in the hardest room in northern Michigan.

End a Harbor Springs day on the point, on foot, with the bay going silver and the carts nowhere in sight. The nineteenth century kept this one seat saved for you.