Old Elm Club

Donald Ross designed Old Elm Club in 1914 on a piece of Highland Park, Illinois North Shore Chicago land. The course was conceived as a male-only private club — a deliberate institutional decision that has remained the club's policy through more than a century — and Old Elm operates without a clubhouse or formal restaurant in the manner of a traditional links club. The membership is small, deliberately quiet, and the hospitality model emphasizes golf-only operations without the social-club apparatus that defines most American country clubs. The Donald Ross 1914 routing has remained substantially intact through generations.

The course plays around 6,800 yards par 70 from the back markers, with bent fairways and a slope in the upper 130s. The yardage is short by modern championship standards, but Ross's green complexes — small, crowned, set on natural rises — defend against modern equipment in ways the back-tee yardage doesn't convey. The fairways play firm given the Illinois prairie-and-glacial subsoil. The fifteenth hole is a 412-yard par-4 with a tee shot played over a creek; the seventeenth, a 195-yard par-3 across a natural depression, is the routing's most-discussed one-shotter. The mature tree canopy through the property gives the routing a parkland character that has been preserved through Ross's 1914 routing.

Old Elm is private and male-only is the defining institutional fact. Access is members and accompanied guests, with women not permitted as members or independent visitors. The hospitality model is austere by American country-club standards — no clubhouse, no formal dining — and the architectural-quality focus on the Ross routing is the primary institutional identity.

Chicago North Shore climate gives Old Elm a playing season of April through October. The course closes through Chicago winter and reopens when the soil thaws — typically late April. The mature tree canopy through the property and the autumn color through October are part of the routing's seasonal photographic signature.