Golf Digest 75
Best Little Golf Towns: Aiken, South Carolina
Jim McNair, Jr.: ‘It’s a difficult thing to run a golf operation, but when it works, there’s nothing better.’
By Joel Beall September 09, 2025
An unmistakable frequency hums in Aiken, S.C., audible only to those smart enough to listen.
You hear it in post-round dissections at a restaurant called the Feed Sack, where golfers resurrect impossible shots and mourn three-putts. It’s in the debates over course architecture that echo across Old Barnwell’s expansive fairways, and the stories that ricochet off ancient pines at the Tree Farm. At Aiken G.C., you’ll see players using calculators to tabulate the financial carnage they suffered or inflicted. This town’s vernacular is spoken fluently by anyone who understands that intelligence isn’t measured by school degrees or test scores but in devotion to the game.
“You don’t get many sightseers down here,” says Jim McNair, the proprietor of Aiken G.C. “People are trying to have fun, relax, but they are serious about their golf.”
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wealthy northeastern families discovered Aiken’s mild winter climate and embraced it as their sporting playground. They came down for hunting, polo and thoroughbred racing, transforming the town into the “Sporting Capital of the South.” From this gilded age also emerged Palmetto Golf Club. Herbert Leeds, architect of Myopia Hunt Club, crafted the original design. Alister MacKenzie’s subsequent touches were so compelling that Bobby Jones wrote to him, “That layout you designed at Aiken is liked so well that the Aiken colony does not seem to be the least bit interested in coming over to the Augusta National.” Ben Hogan claimed Palmetto had some of the finest back-to-back holes in all of golf. Recent restoration work by Gil Hanse has further burnished its status as one of South Carolina’s crown jewels…