Great Dunes, long-forgotten Golden Age classic, is reborn in Georgia

Architect Brian Ross has been in the golf business long enough to have worked on plenty of courses with plenty of talented designers. Still, when he and his partner, Jeffrey Stein, were offered the chance to revive a long-forgotten Walter Travis layout on the dunes of coastal Georgia, he didn’t hesitate.

“That was one of the main motivations for taking this job,” Ross said during the recent grand re-opening of the Great Dunes Golf Club, which carries the same name it did when it debuted in 1928; the design was the last by Travis, a three-time U.S. Amateur champion, completed just after his death.

“Travis didn’t do many courses, and he certainly didn’t do many courses for the public,” Ross said. “He worked mostly for wealthy private clubs — Garden City Golf Club being the most famous — so bringing back one of his few public designs felt like both an honor and a heavy responsibility. We think we did him proud.”

The original Great Dunes stretched through rugged seaside terrain, with sweeping views of the Atlantic. But like many courses of its era, it didn’t endure. Storms in 1942 and 1954, combined with constant beach erosion, reduced it to nine holes. After decades of further wear, even that remnant was eventually folded into another local layout and later acquired by the state of Georgia.

The restoration — a six-million-plus-dollar job that began in 2024 — leaned heavily on archival photographs to recapture the original Travis look: the bold dunes and scruffy sandscapes, the rolling contours and ocean vistas. The team also resurfaced the course in paspalum grass from tee to green, a choice well suited to the island climate.

“From ground level today, the land can seem flatter than it was,” Stein said. “But the old photographs, shot from the dunes and bridges, revealed the undulations and green shapes Travis originally laid out.”

The result isn’t a Lido-like recreation of the 1928 design, replicated to within fractions of an inch. But Ross and Stein say it bears an unmistakable Travis imprint, at a scale most public golfers have never experienced.

“It was a big challenge and a big responsibility,” Ross said. “It was also a lot of fun.”

To help guide the work, the duo consulted the Walter Travis Society along with local historians on Jekyll Island, which is owned by the state of Georgia. In their research, Ross found that Travis — an Australian who also won the British Amateur — designed only three public courses: Great Dunes, Potomac Park East in Washington, D.C., and a layout in Buffalo, N.Y.

The island’s historic hotel, with its signature rounded turrets, opened in the early 1900s and once catered to some of the wealthiest travelers in the country. The Travis course followed shortly after, bearing such defining features as towering dunes, sandy blowouts and long glances at the ocean.

The new Great Dunes preserves the layout’s throwback spirit, with modern-day improvements. It is the first course in Georgia, for instance, to irrigate with a brackish-water system designed to reduce freshwater use, curb chemicals and minimize environmental impact. A new wildlife corridor, built along a former rail line near the course, has also brought new species to the property.

Now open to the public, the layout plays 7,014 yards from the back tees and 4,818 from the forward markers, a par-72 that roughly mirrors what Travis envisioned for the oceanside playground a century ago.

“We want to host college tournaments, community events, public play and local island memberships,” said Mark Williams, the Jekyll Island Authority’s executive director. “We feel like we’ve gone back to the future with this layout.”