Jekyll Island Golf Club - Great Dunes

Great Dunes traces its roots to an oceanfront course laid out by Walter Travis during Jekyll Island's private-club era, when Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and other wintering elites played it. The layout debuted in 1928, shortly after Travis's death, making it one of the few Travis designs open to the public. Storms in 1942 and 1954 plus beach erosion reduced the original eighteen to nine holes, which were later folded into the island's public golf operation. In 2024 a multimillion-dollar restoration used archival photographs to recapture Travis's design, pairing his surviving oceanfront holes with nine reimagined holes from the former Oleander course to form a full eighteen. The renewed course, resurfaced in paspalum turf with a brackish-water irrigation system, reopened in 2025, blending Golden Age character with modern sustainability. It remains a rare, publicly accessible example of early oceanfront golf on the Georgia coast.