Some of America's oldest golf courses sit right on the lawns of its oldest hotels — and a handful of those properties predate the Civil War by decades. If you like your rounds with a side of history, these five resorts, all founded before 1850, pair grand old lodgings with courses that have been played since the 1890s.
The Omni Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, dates back to 1766. Its Old Course, finished in 1892, still operates the country's oldest continuously used first tee. Architects including William S. Flynn and Rees Jones have updated it over the years, and the current layout runs 6,099 yards with a neat symmetry: six par 3s, six par 4s and six par 5s. Golf Digest still rates it highly despite its age.
In Woodstock, Vermont, the Woodstock Inn & Resort (1793) offers The Course at Woodstock Inn, set against Mount Peg and the Kedron Valley woods. It began as a nine-holer in 1895 and is now an 18-hole, par-70 Robert Trent Jones Sr. design tied to the Woodstock Country Club. Golf Magazine regularly places the resort among the top 100 golf resorts in the US.
The Omni Bedford Springs Resort & Spa in Bedford, Pennsylvania (1806), is home to the Old Course, first laid out in 1898 by Spencer Oldham and later shaped by A.W. Tillinghast and Donald Ross. It's a regular on best-public-course lists from Golfweek, Golf Digest and Golf Channel's Golf Pass.
French Lick Springs Hotel in Indiana (1845) might be the strongest pick for serious golfers. Donald Ross built its course there in 1917 — a par-70 championship with deep-faced bunkers that make the par 3s notoriously tough. It hosted the 1924 PGA Championship and was renovated in 2007 to keep its classic character. There's a second option too: Pete Dye's hall-of-fame course, a Golfweek top public course for 17 straight years.
Finally, the Grand Hotel Golf Resort & Spa in Point Clear, Alabama (1847), serves up 36 holes on the Azalea and Dogwood courses. Perry Maxwell designed them in 1947, they were renovated in 2018, and they're part of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail and the Lakewood Golf Club — all set among magnolias and pines.
Why it matters: these are working resorts, not museums. You can book a room, play a round on a course that's more than a century old, and walk fairways that hosted PGA champions — without needing a private club membership. Golfers planning a US trip with a historic tilt could easily build a week around two or three of these properties, since they're spread across Virginia, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Alabama.
