A new course on the Georgia coast offers the public a rare glimpse at the design prowess of golf’s “Old Man”
The number of holes at Jekyll Island Golf Club may have been reduced from 63 to 54, but golfers will definitely benefit when the southern Georgia barrier island opens its freshly routed 18-hole Great Dunes course for public play in early November.
After renovating its Pine Lakes course in 2024, the club turned to architects Brian Ross and Jeffrey Stein to morph its iconic seaside layout—created by legendary architect Walter Travis (the “Old Man”) in 1927, and since reduced from 18 to nine holes—into a new, Travis-inspired 18-holer. To get there, the tandem borrowed land from the adjacent Oleander course, with the rest of that former Dick Wilson design relegated to wetland conservation.
With the help of historical imagery, Ross and Stein were able to return the existing Travis holes to their original footprints—stripping years of overgrowth and restoring the raw coastal look of the land—and recreate elements from the course’s lost holes, destroyed in the 1940s. For added inspiration, the architects visited some of Travis’s finest works—including Garden City Golf Club (N.Y.), Hollywood (N.J.), and Cape Arundel (Maine)—using their research to help them create Golden Age quirks and Travis-style fairway contours, bunkers, and greens.
Great Dunes 2.0 begins with three new holes cut through a maritime forest. After the par-three 3rd—its uniquely mounded green modeled after the eccentric 12th at Garden City—golfers play the original Travis holes (4–12) among the dunes, with views of the Atlantic revealed at the 4th green. The journey home includes holes along a tidal estuary.
Scattered around the course are winsome elements that will further distinguish Great Dunes, like the two-plank wooden bridge brought back to life to transition players from 10 to 11, and a walking tunnel next to the 8th green (created by burying a shipping container underneath a dune) inspired by a similar feature found at Hollywood.
