# The Best Golf Courses in Shepherdstown

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-shepherdstown-wv/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / West Virginia


A leading golf course in West Virginia. Photo: HARRY W. McCORMACK (TEABERRYEAGLE), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Shepherdstown is West Virginia's oldest town, a Potomac River village of stone houses and college students in the Eastern Panhandle, close enough to Washington that its weekends fill with city people looking for exactly this. Its golf list is two courses long, and one of them is not even in Shepherdstown, which in the Eastern Panhandle counts as local geography rather than a problem. A private club course in town, a public course down the road in Charles Town feeding off the casino and racetrack crowds: that is the bench, stated plainly, and the ranking that follows does not pretend the town is a golf destination. It is a town with golf, which is a different and perfectly respectable thing.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here the split is total. The private course wins the golf, the public course wins access by default, and any golfer can play exactly one of them this weekend.

## 1Cress Creek Golf and Country Club

Cress Creek is Shepherdstown's private course, a Ron Kirby design, and Kirby's involvement matters in a two course town: he was a working architect of the old school who built playable, handsome golf across the mid Atlantic, and a named designer of his generation gives a small town club a legitimacy its size alone would not. The course serves a residential club community, members drawn from the panhandle and the Washington exurbs beyond it, and it plays as proper club golf in a pretty river town setting.

The concession is the private wall, again. Shepherdstown's best course is one its visitors, and most of its residents, will only ever see from outside the property line. A ranking can crown it and still admit the crown is theoretical for nearly everyone.

Theoretical or not, the golf puts it first. In a short list, the designed course with a real architect and a settled membership is the anchor, and Cress Creek is the reason Shepherdstown appears in a golf ranking at all rather than only in a travel guide.

## 2Locust Hill Golf Course (Charles Town)

Locust Hill is the public option, over in Charles Town, where it serves a different economy entirely: the casino and racetrack crowds, the weekend visitors, and panhandle golfers who need a tee time rather than a membership. That role shapes the golf. This is accessible, working public golf in the valley, priced and paced for the market it sits in, and it gives the eastern end of the panhandle a round anyone can book.

That matters more in this corner of West Virginia than it might elsewhere. The panhandle fills on weekends with visitors chasing the track, the tables and the river towns, and a share of them bring clubs. Locust Hill is the course that catches them, plus the year round local game that no private club in the county is structured to hold. It is not glamorous work. It is the work that keeps a region's golf public.

The concession is that it borrows this list's town. Locust Hill is Charles Town's course doing Shepherdstown duty because Shepherdstown's own public bench is empty, and on the golf it sits a clear tier below the private club up the road.

Second place, and the only place most golfers will ever play on this list. Shepherdstown keeps its old streets and its river, Cress Creek keeps its gates, and Locust Hill keeps the tee sheet open for everyone else, with the Blue Ridge filling in the distance and the Potomac doing what it has done since before there was a town here at all.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.