Oak Hill’s leaders engaged Donald Ross after a 1921 land exchange relocated the club from the Genesee River to a 355-acre Pittsford tract with room for two 18s. Ross laid out the East in 1924; the course matured in 1925, and members began play at the new site in 1926. While the club’s public-facing histories emphasize Ross’s authorship, there is no documentary evidence of a later Ross-led redesign after opening.
Through mid-century, the East evolved under outside hands. In preparation for national championships, Robert Trent Jones Sr. tightened landing zones, bracketed fairways with flanking bunkers and reduced or removed some original “short” hazards, changes consistent with his 1950s U.S. Open era work. Contemporary accounts also note a significant post-1949 alteration that replaced a Ross par-4 to facilitate spectator flow.
In the 1970s, George and Tom Fazio undertook a more invasive modernization: they redesigned the 5th, 6th and 15th holes and moved the 18th green—moves that helped Oak Hill continue to stage majors but diverged from Ross’s original character and routing intentions.
Beginning in 2019, Andrew Green led a comprehensive restoration that rebuilt every green to USGA specs, re-imagined bunkers with a refined but rugged Ross-consistent look, lengthened tees where appropriate, removed select trees to reopen sun, air and vistas, and—crucially—reclaimed Ross’s strategic relationships on the three Fazio-altered holes (notably re-introducing the creek-driven interest at 6 and rebuilding 5 and 15 with Ross-scale greens and surrounds). Work commenced August 2019 and concluded ahead of the 2023 PGA.
Unique Design Characteristics
The East remains a study in how Ross set golf diagonally across natural movement and water. At the opener (“Challenge”), the tee shot must negotiate a downslope into a fairway pinched by bunkers before Allens Creek crosses at roughly 360 yards—an early example of Ross’s preference at Oak Hill to make the ground game and angles matter immediately. Ben Hogan famously called it the toughest opening test he’d seen, a reputation the club still repeats.
Ross’s par-3s at Oak Hill rely on green sites rather than spectacle. The third (“Vista”) demands exact trajectory to clear a fronting trio of bunkers and hold against an aggressive false front; short approaches are routinely repelled. The short 15th (“The Plateau”), rebuilt under Green, restores a Ross-scaled, multi-tiered target whose tightly mown right runoff punishes a miss to the high side. These targets typify how the restored East asks players to land on precise shelves rather than simply carry to the middle.
Allens Creek is the course’s most eloquent hazard. The long 6th (“Double Trouble”) now plays as Ross intended conceptually: a slight dogleg with the creek meandering across the lay-up space and guarding long and left of a multi-tier green—requiring placement first, then nerve. The following hole, “Creek’s Elbow,” turns uphill after the stream runs up the right and then slants across the driving line, a diagonal interaction that tempts aggression but makes the uphill approach harder from the bold line.
On the inward nine, the 10th’s fairway cascades toward a creek crossing around 350 yards, taming the modern impulse to lash driver; the 11th, a muscular one-shotter, lets right-side water and flanking bunkers dictate shape. The 14th (“Bunker Hill”), once neutered by tree and bunker creep, has been reclaimed as a risk-reward short par-4 where angle to a sharply back-to-front surface is everything; the green and its surrounds now encourage lay-up to preferred distance as much as they tempt the aerial gamble.
Two holes illustrate both Ross’s original thinking and Green’s archival method. The ninth (“Needle’s Eye”) again presents offset bunkering that narrows options up the dogleg right—a feature Green re-established after studying Ross’s 1923 plan for the hole. And the par-5 13th (“Hill of Fame”) uses the creek’s cross at lay-up distance to force a decision, then asks for a precise pitch into a hollowed green amphitheater beneath the clubhouse ridge, re-centering Ross’s ground-game interest at a pivotal moment in the round.
As to surviving Ross fabric, the clearest examples today are the corridor/green relationships and green-pad placements on holes that were never comprehensively rebuilt: 1–4 and 7–13 and 16 retain their Ross siting and approach demands (albeit with modern green construction), while 5, 6 and 15 have been reconstructed specifically to match Ross’s scale, edges and strategic asks using original drawings and early-era photographs as guides.
Historical Significance
Within Ross’s oeuvre, Oak Hill East matters for two intertwined reasons. First, it was among his most ambitious two-course commissions, executed on a fresh property and routed to exploit a modest creek in multiple, distinct ways—an approach Green’s restoration has re-clarified. Second, its tournament record is virtually unmatched: the East has staged the 1949 U.S. Amateur (won by Charles Coe by a record 11&10), the U.S. Opens of 1956 (Cary Middlecoff), 1968 (Lee Trevino), and 1989 (Curtis Strange), the PGA Championships of 1980 (Jack Nicklaus), 2003 (Shaun Micheel) and 2013 (Jason Dufner), the 1995 Ryder Cup, and the 2023 PGA (Brooks Koepka), plus the 1984 U.S. Senior Open and 2019 Senior PGA Championship. The course’s reputation among raters reflects this: in Golf Digest’s current America’s 100 Greatest cycle, the East sits in the low-20s nationally and remains top-ten among New York’s private courses per Golfweek.
Current Condition / Integrity
The 2019–20 project rebuilt every green, re-edged and re-placed bunkers to echo Ross’s drawings, added distance through new tees, and undertook targeted but significant arboreal work to recover sun, air and key vistas of specimen oaks—work that also restored scale to playing corridors. The net effect is a course that looks and plays more like a Ross East, but with green construction that meets modern agronomic expectations. The routing outside the previously altered holes remains Ross’s, and Green’s team concentrated on recapturing green size (and pinnable area) lost to decades of shrinkage. In tournament setup, the East now plays to par 70 at roughly 7,394 yards; for members, it can play as a par-71 up to about 7,360 yards with No. 17 treated as a par-5.
What remains altered relative to Ross’s day are a few greens and surrounds inevitably modernized by nearly a century of championship preparation, and the broad siting of the 18th green, which the Fazios shifted in the 1970s and which remains in that general position even as its surface and surrounds have been reworked to better suit Ross-like play. The restored 5th, 6th and 15th have most fully reclaimed Ross intent; the opener, third, seventh, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and sixteenth show the clearest continuity—in corridor, target placement and recovered short-grass defenses—between Ross’s original East and the present course.
Key dates around the East’s initial opening appear consistently as 1926 in contemporary coverage; the planning and grow-in years (1924–25) are also cited, but detailed day-by-day construction records and Ross correspondence have not been published by the club. The precise year of the Fazios’ 1970s intervention is variously reported (often 1976 or 1979 in secondary sources); the club’s site references “the 1970s” without naming a year. Robert Trent Jones Sr.’s post-1949 changes are well-documented in outline (narrowed fairways, bracketing bunkers, elimination of some forward hazards), though a complete hole-by-hole ledger of his work would require access to the club’s architectural files and committee minutes.
Sources & Notes
Oak Hill Country Club, “East Course” (official hole-by-hole, restoration summary, yardage & pars), accessed 2025.
PGA of America / 2023 PGA Championship, “Course: East Course, Oak Hill” (hole-by-hole and setup context).
Top100GolfCourses.com, “Oak Hill Country Club (East): Work started in August 2019 … aim was to return the East to Ross’s intent using original drawings.”
Golf Digest (Max Adler), “PGA 2023: How Oak Hill will display the work of golf’s hottest new architect” (Andrew Green restoration overview).
Golf Course Industry (Guy Cipriano), “Historic intersection: How a project sparked by improving agronomics returned Oak Hill East to its Donald Ross beginnings.”
PGATour.com (Sean Martin), “How Oak Hill was restored” (context on Robert Trent Jones Sr. and later changes).
USGA.org, “Bringing back Ross’s 9th at Oak Hill East” (offset bunkering and 1923 plan reference).
Democrat & Chronicle (Rochester), “How Oak Hill restored East Course to its glory for the 2023 PGA Championship” (opening year 1926; RTJ par-4 replacement; Fazio scope).
University of Rochester, “Course of history: the move from River Campus to Pittsford” (land swap and relocation context).
Golf.com, “Best Courses in the U.S. 2024–25” (Oak Hill East ranking context).
Golf Digest, course profile “Oak Hill Country Club (East)” (ranking history).
USGA Championship Records: “U.S. Amateur Champions” (1949 Charles Coe at Oak Hill East).
GolfCompendium / USGA / PGA sources for major winners at Oak Hill East (1956 U.S. Open, 1968 U.S. Open, 1980 PGA, 1984 U.S. Senior Open, 1989 U.S. Open, 2003 PGA, 2013 PGA, 2019 Senior PGA, 2023 PGA).