On the south side of Dayton, glaciers shaped the farmland into ridges and hollows, and the club that rose there took its name from the ice. Fifteen years before its grandest day, some of Ohio's most prominent figures looked at that ground and sent for a Scotsman. Alec "Nipper" Campbell had grown up at Troon. In 1899, aged nineteen, he crossed the Atlantic to become the professional at The Country Club in Brookline. He also served at Baltimore Country Club, and he gathered five top-ten finishes in major championships to his name. When the commission came, he was head pro at Miami Valley Golf Club in Dayton. He routed Moraine across the property's most dramatic formations, letting the land do the arguing, and the course opened in 1930. Then he became its professional and held the post for many years. It is a lovely kind of loyalty, to build a place and then spend your working life watching people try to solve it. Of all his design work, Moraine stands as his crowning achievement. Players still struggle, and they struggle almost at once. The 1st is a modest par four on paper, but its green is shaped like an upturned saucer. Leave the approach above the hole and par becomes a small act of heroism. The 2nd and 3rd keep pressing with challenging greens of their own, and first-time visitors tend to give back more strokes than they bargained for so early in the round. For the Club Championship and member play, there is an extra test: a tee tucked behind the putting green, adding 40 yards to the opener and asking you to drive straight over the practice green. On busy days it is impractical, but on the right day it is pure fun. In 1945 Byron Nelson won eleven consecutive tournaments, a record that still stands. The ninth was the only major in that run, the PGA Championship, and he won it here. Following that successful championship, Stanley Allyn, president of the National Cash Register Corporation, worked to build a club for his company. NCR Country Club opened in 1954 on the land just south and east, with two Dick Wilson courses. From the 5th green at Moraine you can often see golfers on the 3rd tee of NCR's South Course up the hill, which hosted its own PGA Championship in 1969, won by Raymond Floyd. For years the neighbor's championship pedigree overshadowed the quieter brilliance below. In 1954, Wilson, working with Joe Lee, gave Moraine a makeover. Over the years, greens were altered too. Then, in 2015 or 2016, more than 80 years after Campbell's original design, Keith Foster came to give the course back to its Scotsman. Working with then-superintendent Jason Mahl and the staff, he took out hundreds of trees so the land's movement could be seen again. The greens were reconstructed and returned to their original intent, and the two back-nine par threes, the 12th and 15th, had to be rebuilt where they had been changed. Fairways were widened and regrassed. Long-lost bunkers were brought back, revealed in old photographs and drawings, ghosts returned to their posts. What remains is a traditional, even old-fashioned parkland course, fair and interesting, strategic and playable, with stunning views across a property that uses its topography to the fullest. Keep to the right line, master the greens, and a decent score is possible. In 2024 the Western Amateur came, and its championship match between Ian Gilligan and Jack Turner ran 29 holes, an 11-hole playoff, before Gilligan won. Out to the west of the 14th, a homeowner with a sense of humor leaves free balls by the fence for anyone who sails one out of bounds, a small kindness at the edge of a course worth every stroke it takes.