Aronimink Golf Club is a private Donald Ross masterpiece set on 300 rolling acres in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia. Founded in 1896 and opened in its current form in 1928, the par-70 layout stretches to over 7,200 yards from the championship tees and has hosted multiple PGA of America major championships.
Aronimink Golf Club
3600 Saint Davids Road, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073, United States
aronimink.org+1 610 356 6055Aronimink Golf Club is a private Donald Ross masterpiece set on 300 rolling acres in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia. Founded in 1896 and opened in its current form in 1928, the par-70 layout stretches to over 7,200 yards from the championship tees and has hosted multiple PGA of America major championships.
Aronimink Golf Club occupies 300 acres of rolling terrain in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, roughly 25 kilometres (16 miles) west of central Philadelphia. Named after the chief of the Lenape tribe who once occupied the farmhouse used as its original clubhouse, the club traces its origins to December 1896, when a group of cricketers laid out a handful of golf holes at 52nd Street and Chester Avenue in southwest Philadelphia.
Aronimink presents one of the most architecturally complete Donald Ross layouts in existence. It is a par-70 championship course restored to its original 1928 vision after decades of meticulous work, and the only venue in history to have staged all three of the PGA of America's rotating major championships.
The Belmont Golf Association, forerunner to Aronimink Golf Club, was incorporated in 1900 following the informal founding four years earlier. The club relocated twice within Philadelphia before acquiring 300 acres in Newtown Square in 1926 and commissioning Donald Ross to design an 18-hole layout. The course opened on Memorial Day 1928, with the accompanying Tudor clubhouse designed by architects Charles Barton Keen and Franklin D. Edmonds.
Ross's original design featured an extraordinarily complex bunker scheme comprising more than 190 individual sand hazards. From the 1950s onward, a series of alterations by William Gordon, Dick Wilson, George Fazio, and Robert Trent Jones gradually simplified that scheme, moving bunkers closer to greens and removing others from play entirely.
In 2003, Ron Prichard completed a restoration project working from Ross's original drawings, returning greens to their original shapes and sizes and reinstating the characteristic bunkering.
A decade and a half later, following the discovery of photographs from 1929, the club commissioned Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner to carry the restoration further — recovering nearly 30,000 square feet of green surface area and expanding the bunker count to over 100 hazards. That work was completed in spring 2018 ahead of the BMW Championship in September of that year.
Aronimink plays as a par 70 stretching to over 7,200 yards from the championship tees, with a routing that uses the property's consistent ridge-and-valley terrain to create a sequence of holes with considerable elevation change and rarely a level lie. The outward half is defined by several demanding doglegs, most notably the par-four 7th, where the approach must carry a deep bunker guarding the front of the green. The 8th, a par three playing downhill to a narrow putting surface, represents one of the toughest one-shot holes on the card.
The inward half opens with a 454-yard par four from an elevated tee, the fairway pitched right-to-left with water protecting the front-left of the green. The par-three 17th plays to approximately 187 yards across a lake. The closing hole — an uphill par four of around 436 yards — returns golfers to the Tudor clubhouse, completing a layout that balances sidehill, downhill, ridge-to-ridge, and uphill sequences with deliberate variety.
Ross designed Aronimink's greens to be the principal defence of par, being crowned, internally contoured, and offering numerous pin positions that demand precise approach play. The Hanse restoration enlarged those putting surfaces and reintroduced the severe bunkering that underpins the course's strategic identity. Aronimink sits among the finest examples of Ross's work.
Aronimink Golf Club is the product of a singular architectural vision — Donald Ross's stated intent to build his masterpiece — realised across nearly a century of stewardship that has ultimately returned the course closer to his 1928 conception than at any point since it opened.
The par-70 layout on Newtown Square's rolling terrain delivers a sequence of demanding two-shot holes and intricately defended greens that have earned it a place among the great private courses of the eastern United States.
With the 2026 PGA Championship scheduled for May at Aronimink, this major returns the Wanamaker Trophy to the property for the first time since Gary Player's 1962 victory.
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