# The Best Golf Courses in St. Paul

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-st-paul-mn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Minnesota


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

St. Paul is the quieter twin, the state capital with the older bones, and its golf carries a history that Minneapolis partisans do not enjoy hearing. The city's county course hosted the PGA Championship twice, back when the PGA was a match-play prize fought over by the best players alive, and its private club claims a founding date of 1888, which would make it one of the oldest golf clubs in America west of the original eastern game. Four courses make this list: the old private club, the historic county course, and two city courses that fill in the everyday game.

The argument at the top is genuine, and it is the best one in Minnesota golf. Private pedigree against public glory. A club that claims 1888 against a muni that hosted two majors. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and the access column is what finally moves the needle: a course anyone can play, with that championship past, beats a course almost nobody can play, however old its claim. Twin Cities golfers have had this fight before. They will have it again after reading the order.

## 1Keller Golf Course

Keller is a Ramsey County course that hosted two PGA Championships and decades of St. Paul Opens, and every part of that sentence should be impossible. County courses do not host majors. They host outings. Keller hosted the PGA when the championship was a serious test of the best professionals in the game, and then, for decades, it hosted the St. Paul Open, a regular stop where tour golf came to a public course and played in front of the people who played there on weekends. That double life, major venue and municipal home, makes Keller one of the most democratic championship courses in America, and there are not many entries in that category.

The golf holds up its end of the story, a classic layout that has been cared for like the civic asset it is rather than the afterthought munis usually become. The concession is conditioning at the margins, the honest tax on public play, and the fact that Keller's golden weeks are history now rather than a living calendar. Neither matters to the ranking. A public golfer in St. Paul can walk onto a two-time PGA Championship course and pay a county fee. Golf has very few offers like that left. First place, and it is not manufactured drama. It is gratitude.

## 2Town and Country Club

Town and Country claims 1888, and if the claim holds, this is one of the founding clubs of American golf, a private course above the Mississippi in the city where western golf began. The club's supporters will read Keller at No. 1 as the usual public-course sentimentality, and they have a case worth hearing: Town and Country's golf is private-club golf at full standard, its setting on the river bluffs is the finest ground on this list, and its continuity, a club playing its game on its own terms for well over a century, is the kind of thing rankings claim to honor.

The concession runs the other way. Town and Country's history is a claim about itself, where Keller's is a record of the game's biggest events happening in public. The club also concedes access completely, which matters in a town whose golf identity is unusually public. Second place here is no disgrace. It is a founding-era private club beaten by a major championship muni, and there is exactly one town in America where that sentence could be written.

## 3Highland National Golf Course

Highland National is St. Paul's south side city course, the everyday championship of the neighborhood golfer: a full-size public round, kept to a standard the city's players rely on, in the Highland Park district where it serves as local infrastructure in spikes. It does not have Keller's trophies or Town and Country's founding date. It has tee sheets full of St. Paul golfers, which is its own kind of record.

Third place concedes design distinction. Highland National is a good municipal course in a town that happens to own a great one, and the comparison within the same system is unkind. But depth matters to a city's golf health, and a St. Paul golfer shut out of Keller's weekend sheet has Highland waiting. Most cities cannot say their fallback is this solid.

## 4Como Park Golf Course

Como Park is the city's short, friendly round by the park and the lake, golf in its most recreational form, and it closes the list in the position that form earns when the scoring starts with architecture. Its players are beginners, families, seniors, and golfers squeezing nine holes out of a summer evening, and a city system needs exactly one course that asks nothing of anyone. Como is that course, and it does the job with the park's greenery around it and no pretensions whatsoever.

Fourth, then, with the concession built in and accepted. St. Paul's list ends the way the city's golf actually distributes itself: a public course with two majors on its record at the top, a club claiming 1888 behind it, and the neighborhood flags at Como still out as the light goes, in the capital city that quietly holds the oldest golf argument in the Midwest.

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