There are places in American golf that feel guarded, gated, held back for the few. Lawsonia Links, in Green Lake, Wisconsin, is not one of them, and that is the first thing worth loving about it. Here is a course that belongs among the best public golf in America, and in the harder, more stubborn argument over the best course in Wisconsin of any kind, public, private, or resort. And it is open to anyone who wants to play it. The course was built by Langford & Moreau, a firm that never collected the fame of some of its contemporaries. William Langford and his partner did this work toward the end of America's best era of design, the period we now call the Golden Age. Lawsonia carries the best parts of that era in its bones. But it also leans forward. You can sense the next age of architecture arriving in the way the land has been shaped, in what the earthmoving of the coming years made possible. Lawsonia stands at a hinge in history, looking back and ahead at once. Nowhere is that clearer than on the greens. They are push-up greens, built up from the surrounding ground, and that style carries a known danger. Too often such greens repeat themselves, each one tilting back to front like the last, until they begin to blur together. Langford & Moreau refused that monotony. They found variation after variation within a style that seems to resist it, and some greens even fall away from the line of play, a quiet surprise for anyone expecting the usual tilt. The achievement is that each surface feels distinct from the others. You remember them individually, the way you remember faces. Then there is the stranger history, the one that catches you off guard on an otherwise idyllic afternoon. Lawsonia has served more than one purpose through the years. It has been a summer-vacation golf course, a place of leisure and long light. During World War II it was something else entirely: a prison for prisoners of war. Guard towers from those days can still be seen from the course. The first you encounter stands behind the second green, and it is hard to finish the hole without glancing up at it and feeling the weight of another time pressing against this one. The prisoners were apparently treated well at Lawsonia, so well that some of them did not want to leave at the end of the war. It is a curious thought to carry down the fairways, that a place of confinement could also be a place someone was reluctant to leave. Today the course is owned by the American Baptist Association, one more layer in a long and unlikely biography. Summer retreat, wartime prison, and now this: few courses have lived so many lives. Lawsonia is not only the Links. There is a second eighteen, the Woodlands, and Craig Haltom and his firm Oliphant Golf have made substantial progress there in recent years. It is a course worth respect in its own right. But the Links casts a long shadow, and that says nothing against the Woodlands. It says everything about the older course. Given the chance to play the Links again, it is hard to imagine passing it up. Perhaps that is the real measure of the place. It is generous enough to welcome anyone, and good enough that once you have played it, you start planning your way back.