Franklin Canyon at Franklin Canyon Golf Course

Franklin Canyon Golf Course sits in Hercules, a city in western Contra Costa County along the San Pablo Bay shoreline. The course was designed by Robert Muir Graves, a prolific California architect whose career spanned from the 1950s through the 1990s. Graves designed or redesigned more than a hundred courses throughout the western United States, often working with terrain that required creative routing solutions and an understanding of regional landscapes.

The course occupies rolling terrain characteristic of the East Bay hills, where the layout works through natural elevation changes and canyon features that give the facility its name. Graves typically emphasized playability across skill levels while incorporating the existing landforms into his designs, and Franklin Canyon reflects this approach with holes that move through varied topography. The setting offers views across the bay and surrounding hillsides, placing the course within the broader landscape of the East Bay's transition zone between urban development and open space.

Franklin Canyon serves as a municipal facility, providing public access to golf in a region where the sport has deep roots dating to the early twentieth century. The course functions as a neighborhood amenity in Hercules, a planned community that developed significantly in the latter decades of the twentieth century. It represents the kind of accessible, moderately scaled public course that Graves designed throughout California during a period of suburban expansion and increased demand for recreational golf facilities.