Day 1 - July 15, 2025 - Elverson, PA
There’s something poetic about starting a golf trip in total chaos: sleeping on the floor at Newark airport, rain pounding the ceiling, waiting for your buddies to trickle in. That’s when you know you’re in for a week you’ll remember. Our first stop was Stonewall Old Course out in Elverson, Pennsylvania—a place that, if you care about architecture, is a pilgrimage.
Stonewall isn’t ancient, but it has the soul of a classic. The club itself was founded in the early 1990s by a group of Philadelphia golf die-hards who wanted to create a pure, walking-only experience, free from the country club noise and gimmicks. They brought in a young Tom Doak, then just making his name in the golf world after years working with Pete Dye and crisscrossing the globe to study the greats. It’s fitting that Stonewall Old was Doak’s first solo design—he used it as a laboratory for all the minimalist principles he’d absorbed, and it shows in every corner of the course.
What makes Stonewall Old so unique, even among Doak’s resume, is how completely it lets the land do the talking. The property was an old dairy farm—a perfect patchwork of rolling hills, wooded ridges, and broad meadows just begging for golf. Doak’s touch was so light that sometimes you honestly forget any “design” even happened. There are no forced carries for the sake of drama, no tricked-up greens. Just natural, thoughtful holes that seem to have existed long before 1993.
The greens are compact, quick, and loaded with subtlety. There’s an honesty here—miss in the wrong spot, and you’re scrambling; get lazy with your wedge, and you’re staring at a nervy chip. Around the putting surfaces, Doak uses short grass and gentle slopes to keep you guessing. The bunkering is classic understated Doak: never showy, always strategic, just punishing enough to make you think on every shot.
But for me, the heart of the round is the stretch from five through eight. Hole five is a quietly tough par 4 that asks for precision off the tee—get aggressive and you’ll flirt with trouble, but find the right angle and you’ve got a real shot at birdie. Six is classic risk-reward—a par 5 with choices all the way, and a green that never makes anything easy. Seven’s par 3 is a masterclass in simplicity: nothing in the way but air and your own nerves, with a green that shrugs at anything but a committed shot. Then eight, another demanding par 4, pulls you back toward the old farmstead. The tee shot is all about positioning; the approach forces you to think twice about how much you can bite off. Every hole in that stretch is fair, tough, and just the right amount of quirky.
The walk at Stonewall is about as pure as it gets—greens and tees are always close, the transitions make sense, and you never feel like you’re being shuffled around just for effect. Everything is exactly where you’d put it if you owned the land and cared about the game more than anything else.
Eighteen, the closer, brings you back to the understated stone clubhouse that fits perfectly into the landscape. The hole is not about raw power—it’s about controlling your ball, your nerves, and finishing the right way. When you walk off, you can’t help but want another crack at it.
Stonewall Old is a modern club with a timeless feel—no bells and whistles, no extra noise. Just a quiet, confident place that lets the architecture and land do all the talking. It’s a place you walk off wanting more, which is about the highest praise I can give any course.