Architect Brian Ross has been in the golf business long enough to have worked in many fields with many talented designers. Yet when he and his partner, Jeffrey Stein, were offered the chance to revive a long-forgotten Walter Travis layout in 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 reopening of Great Dunes Golf Club, which bears the same name it had when it debuted in 1928; the design was last by Travis, three times US Amateur champion, completed shortly after his death.
“Travis didn’t do a lot of courses and he certainly didn’t do a lot of public courses,” Ross said. “He worked mainly for wealthy private clubs – Garden City Golf Club being the most famous—so bringing back one of his few public models felt like both an honor and a heavy responsibility. We think we’ve done him proud.”
The original Great Dunes stretched across rugged coastal terrain, with sweeping views of the Atlantic. But like many courses of its era, it did not last. Hurricanes in 1942 and 1954, combined with continued beach erosion, reduced it to nine holes. After decades of further wear and tear, even that remnant was eventually folded into another local plan and later purchased by the state of Georgia.
The restoration — a $6 million-plus job that began in 2024 — relied heavily on archival photographs to recapture Travis’ original look: bold dunes and rugged sandscapes, rolling contours and ocean vistas. The team also resurfaced the course in paspalum grass from tee to green, an appropriate choice for the island’s climate.
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courtesy big dunes
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Austin Kaseman
“From ground level today, the earth may look flatter than it was,” Stein said. “But the old photographs, taken from the dunes and bridges, revealed the undulations and green shapes first shown by Travis.”
The result is not one Lido-as a recreation of the 1928 design, replicated within fractions of an inch. But Ross and Stein say there’s an unmistakable Travis imprint, on a scale most public players 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 pair consulted with the Walter Travis Society along with local historians on Jekyll Island, which is owned by the state of Georgia. In their research, Ross discovered that Travis—an Australian who also won the British Amateur—designed only three public courses: Great Dunes, Potomac Park East in Washington, DC, and an urban layout in Buffalo, NY.
The island’s historic hotel, with its rounded turrets, opened in the early 1900s and once catered to some of the country’s wealthiest travelers. The Travis Course followed shortly after, retaining such defining features as towering dunes, sand dunes and long ocean views.
The new Great Dunes maintains the throwback spirit of the structure, with modern upgrades. It is the first course in Georgia, for example, 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 railway line next to the course, has also brought new species to the property.
Now open to the public, the layout plays 7,014 yards from the back fairways and 4,818 from the front markers, a par-72 that roughly mirrors what Travis envisioned for the oceanfront playground a century ago.
“We want to host college tours, community events, public games and local memberships on the islands,” said Mark Williams, executive director of the Jekyll Island Authority. “We feel like we’re back in the future with this layout.”
