DURHAM, North Carolina — The antiquated men’s restroom at Hillandale Golf Course in Durham, North Carolina, is a good place to start. In this dimly lit back corner of the municipal course’s cozy clubhouse sits a rest area adorned in 1960s-era light green stalls, ivory cinderblock walls and worn brown floor tiles.
A makeshift sign posted beside a mirror next to a sink blares: “Please don’t wash your shoes in the sink.” Another sign once posted nearby read: “Please don’t steal our range balls.” They are so matter-of-fact and humorous that you can picture Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler character from the movie “Caddyshack” adding the lines to his repertoire.
Any golfer who grew up or lived in North Carolina’s Triangle region — Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh — knows the course, not because it is some championship layout, but because of its place in the game and community.
That aura surrounds 125 acres that has hosted golf in various forms for 115 years. Affectionate nicknames such as “The Ditch” or “Royal Hillandale” are common. On the golf shop wall, a century-plus-old scorecard from the original private course displays a par 3½ hole — an odd design that did not fit a whole number.
Hall of Famer Craig Wood opened with consecutive 67s at the 1944 Durham Open before beating Byron Nelson by three strokes when the tournament concluded at nearby Hope Valley Country Club, sealing Hillandale’s legacy as a former PGA Tour site. Celebrated architects Donald Ross and Perry Maxwell are linked to early versions of the course (mostly as undocumented footnotes), before George Cobb designed the current routing in 1961. Bluebird houses pepper the grounds — an Eagle Scout project that inspired the course’s recent logo update.
Boxed in on one side by Interstate 85 traffic and split by two-lane Hillandale Road toward Duke University, the course — mostly situated in Ellerbe Creek’s floodplain — has the comfortable, worn-in feel of vintage Converse Chuck Taylors. The weathered, unpretentious vibe celebrates outdoor recreation and a love for the game golfers can enjoy whether scoring in the 70s or 110s. It’s not uncommon to find a foursome assembled from a wide assortment of ages, genders, professions and races.
It doesn’t matter. After all, axioms of a golf course’s long-term success have always been, “location, location, location” and accessibility. Hillandale, which opened in 1912, has that centralized locale on Durham’s city map as its lifesaving characteristic.
“If you look at us from an aerial view, we are primely located to have an impact, even in a down time,” says Karl Kimball, 69, Hillandale’s director of golf, who was a 2025 Carolinas PGA Hall of Fame inductee and played on the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Our first thought isn’t our bottom line, but how can we serve the community with any work we do here.”
Hillandale is where countless locals picked up the game — through packed summer junior clinics from the 1950s on and the flighted, local match-play golf tournament that the local newspapers sponsored and covered like the Masters from the 1940s until printed papers’ demise in 2018. Participation has ranged from casual, first-timer rounds to eccentric gambling games involving players nicknamed “Rat Man” and “Beagle” through the 1980s.
The course, though, is finally not resting on its past. An expanded driving range, an undulating putting green three times its former size and a new short-game area opened on July 31. The first significant construction project at the course in more than 60 years focuses on SwingPals, a Durham-based inner-city schools initiative for middle schoolers launched in 2012 by Doug Hodges, an Englishman and former New York City commodities broker who had a passion for mentoring disadvantaged youth. SwingPals makes its home at Hillandale, carrying on a mission similar to the original 1997 First Tee concept: “servicing children who face adversity and have low resources, via the game of golf,” according to Hodges.
Expanding from 20 total tee stations to 50 artificial-turf bays doubles the capacity available to SwingPals daily. A $1 million standalone classroom building is planned, while Duke University is conducting a three-year study on the program’s impact, which could lead to even larger funding sources. Motivated by the SwingPals momentum, the City of Durham appropriated nearly $1 million, and the course management company Amerazil Golf has added approximately $200,000 to complete the practice-area work, which was handled by Craig Haltom Golf Design. Kimball said that by mid-August he had already surpassed the range traffic goal for that month.
An estimated 11,000 teenagers over 14 years have been influenced by participating in SwingPals’ in-school program and a smaller number “graduated” to visit 1600 Hillandale Road. Among the most recent is Kamere Bishop, a junior at Southern Durham High School. Kamere isn’t a budding Tour pro, but a slight Black teenager whose five-year SwingPals program experience has been a life changer.
“I was able to really be able to connect to myself and with other people by just learning the simple fundamentals of being able to regulate your emotions, whether you get some bad news at home or you make a really bad shot on the golf course,” Bishop told CBS 17 in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the grand opening. “SwingPals wasn’t meant just for golf. It was really more of just a good way to be able to find yourself.”
The course expansion aligns with a nationwide golf boom. Hillandale has totaled a record 56,000-plus rounds annually in recent years. A National Golf Foundation report in July 2026 counted approximately 3,000 U.S. municipal courses — an all-time high. The NGF also reported in June a record 7.7 million Asian, Black and Hispanic golfers nationwide, closely matching the demographics of Durham County (42% white, 33% Black and 15% Hispanic). The course also pulls students from nearby Duke, the University of North Carolina and N.C. Central, offering a younger demographic.
All this momentum begs the question: What’s next? As Durham evolved from a rough-hewn tobacco and factory town in the early 20th-century into one of North Carolina’s five largest cities, its municipal course grew with it. The comfort of playing an old course that maxes out at 6,400 yards and par 71 for $45 has become an attractive characteristic in today’s golf landscape.
Munis in Asheville and Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina, successfully undertook renovations in recent years by using a mix of funding mechanisms that didn’t tax residents and didn’t raise green fees substantially but grew the return on investment substantially.
Earlier this year in Georgia, the Augusta Municipal Course, aka “The Patch” partially for its long history of poor conditioning, received an infusion of more than $50 million from nearby Augusta National Golf Club to become a regional goldmine with an additional short course designed by Tiger Woods. Opened in 1926, it is a golf facility so rich in tradition that, in 2023, Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley called “The Patch” a course with “wonderful bones” and there was interest “in taking this [concept] on the road.”
Further history also dictates something more for Hillandale. Three men with Hillandale roots went on to become PGA of America Presidents (Alex Pirie, Henry Poe and Will Mann). Skip Alexander, whose successful PGA Tour career was shortened when severely burned in a 1951 airplane crash, grew up adjacent to the course in the 1930s. The Thorpe brothers, led by PGA Tour pros Jim and Chuck, from nearby Roxboro, also played numerous rounds there in the 1970s after the course was integrated in 1970.
John Sprunt Hill, the course’s namesake who died in 1961, was a wise businessman who among other area institutions founded the Durham Athletic Park from “Bull Durham” movie fame in the 1920s. The avid golfer gave the segregated course to the city in 1940, laying the groundwork for its municipal life which expanded in late 1970 when a federal court opened it to everyone. Finally, the then-underperforming course avoided closure in 2011 when Kimball and Amerazil Golf began today’s route to financial success.
This current state of Hillandale is pertinent, as the NGF study found that 70% of municipal facilities in its national database are more than 50 years old and experiencing infrastructure issues.
That would include Hillandale.
The original, 4,500-square foot clubhouse has mold and space issues that need to be addressed. With a larger footprint, hosting community and charity events, along with amateur competitions would be more feasible.
Hillandale’s irrigation and drainage dates to 1961. The routing ambles through the creek flood plain on the front nine and around the city’s waterworks and reservoir in the middle of the back nine. A vastly overgrown Ellerbe Creek, which for more than one mile bisects the property, has been mismanaged since a restoration in the early 2000s, and there are issues with invasive overgrown trees and course erosion. Additional mixed-use construction around the course perimeter in the coming years will add more unwanted water runoff.
Through all the diatribes about golf, particularly municipal golf, Hillandale is more than just a place to play a game. It’s an experience worth enhancing — warts and all.
