There is a moment, standing on the first tee at Black Creek, when the valley seems to tilt toward you. The fairway falls away downhill for 421 yards to a Double Plateau green, and beyond it the land rises into the ridges outside Chattanooga: Raccoon Mountain pressed close against the course, Lookout Mountain holding the long view. It is an old-fashioned way to begin a round, and that is exactly the point. Black Creek was built to remember things that most modern golf had forgotten. The remembering began with Doug Stein, one of the founding members, a contractor who had built the Honors Course and would later renovate Lookout Mountain. He wanted a new-millennium course in the manner of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, the Golden Age architects whose "ideal holes" became templates for the game. Brian Silva was handed the task of recreating those designs with modern construction equipment. It was an unlikely brief for its moment. Courses were being shaped with containment mounding and threaded through mundane housing developments, and here was a residential community choosing square greens and deep grass-faced bunkers instead. Black Creek arrived ahead of its time, one of the earliest of the modern template courses, perhaps the very first, long before the idea became fashionable. So the old favourites are all here. A Redan, a Cape, a Short and a Punchbowl appear as the round unfolds, each one a kind of quotation. But the course never reads as a museum. Original holes sit among the replicas, and Silva slipped inventive modern touches in beside the antique geometry. The pleasure lies in the conversation between the two, the sense that a designer is honouring his masters without simply tracing them. The ninth is where that conversation becomes almost tender. It is one of Silva's originals, and just short of the green stands a stone wall left over from the farm that was once here. The green needed its own reinforcing wall to hold it against the creek, and the new wall ran at an opposing angle to the old one. Where the two overlapped they left a small triangle of ground, and rather than vanish, it was turned into a bunker, perhaps the smallest bunker anywhere. It is a relic and a hazard all at once, a little pocket where the farm and the golf course shake hands. The creek is never far from your mind. At the 458-yard 12th it guards a shallow green at the end of a tough par four, a hole that asks for both length and nerve. Then, near the finish, comes the 17th, 243 yards to a raised putting surface some 70 yards long, split in two by an enormous swale. It is a Biarritz, and on a long par three it becomes a test of judgement as much as strength. Land on the wrong side of that trough and the green feels as wide as the valley. Black Creek is also home to young talent. It is the home course of the Baylor School golf team, which over the years has made itself one of the strongest high school programs in the country. In the early 2000s, Luke List, Harris English, Keith Mitchell and Stephan Jaeger all played for Baylor's legendary coach, Henry "King" Oehmig, and all of them have since become PGA Tour members. And all around, the mountains keep their own long memory. One of those ridges was ground for the Battle Above the Clouds in the American Civil War. The other is a state wildlife observation area, home to raccoons. Between them lies a golf course that is old in spirit, new in craft, and fond of the land it was given.