Crystal Downs Country Club

Crystal Downs Country Club was incorporated in 1927 after Grand Rapids businessman Walkley Ewing secured a dramatic stretch of land between Crystal Lake and Lake Michigan near Frankfort, Michigan. Alister MacKenzie, fresh from Cypress Point, visited the site and, working alongside Perry Maxwell who supervised construction, routed the eighteen holes over roughly ten days before sailing home. The new front nine opened by 1929, with the full layout completed in the early 1930s; MacKenzie never returned to see it finished. Long a connoisseur's favorite, Crystal Downs is celebrated for its wildly contoured greens, the fearsome par-4 seventeenth, and a routing that flows naturally across rumpled, glacial dunes terrain. It consistently ranks among the finest courses in the United States and the world, and is widely regarded as one of MacKenzie and Maxwell's collaborative masterpieces.