Brian Schneider and Blake Conant built a bold, quirky, endlessly replayable course over heaving sandhills, and when it opened in the fall of 2023 Old Barnwell vaulted straight to the top of the Aiken conversation — Golf Digest’s latest state ranking slots it ahead of every other course on this list. Bold, strange, and impossible to stop replaying in your head — the new standard-bearer of the Sandhills.
PGA Tour pro Zac Blair spent a decade tweeting about building his dream club — then actually did it, on a sandy former pine nursery near Batesburg, opening the same fall as Old Barnwell just a few miles away. Tom Doak routed the course and Kye Goalby shaped it into a fast-running, fescue-lined throwback that immediately cracked Golf Digest’s Second 100 Greatest. Pick a side in the Old Barnwell–Tree Farm argument; either way, you win.
Founder Weldon Wyatt hired Tom Fazio to carve a private sanctuary out of 4,000 acres of former timberland, and when it opened in 2001 Sage Valley instantly became the establishment heavyweight of the corridor — think Augusta-grade conditioning without the cameras. Every spring it hosts the Junior Invitational, widely regarded as the most prestigious junior tournament in the world. Two decades on, it’s still the club every golfer in the Sandhills wants a letter from.
Founded in 1892 by sportsman Thomas Hitchcock, Palmetto is one of the oldest continuously operating eighteen-hole courses in the country — Herbert Leeds stretched the original holes into a full eighteen, and in 1932, fresh off building Augusta National, Alister MacKenzie converted the sand greens to grass using Augusta’s own contractor. Legend has it Augusta’s founders briefly worried MacKenzie had made Palmetto the better club. During Masters week, the smart money skips the corporate hospitality and plays here instead.