In 1925, C.S. Woolworth sent a telegram to Walter J. Travis. The Country Club of Scranton had been founded in 1896 on ground beside downtown, in Dunmore, and it was looking for somewhere new. Travis came, saw a hilly piece of land a few miles north of the city, and after that single visit called it "favorable to the development of a first-class golf course." In 1927 the club appointed him to lay out eighteen holes there. He was right about the land. The ground in Clarks Summit belongs to the mountainous country of northern Pennsylvania, and it does not hide that. Holes play straight down bold slopes, across them and over them, and the movement is severe yet playable, putting drama into every round. That drama is the setting, though, not the subject. The subject is the greens. Fifteen of the eighteen are Travis originals, and they rank among the finest sets of putting surfaces in the country. Their internal contours are bold and intricate, and they offer a wealth of exciting hole locations. In a state as crowded with great golf as Pennsylvania, that is a remarkable thing to own. The other three, the 4th, 5th and 11th, carry a smaller and stranger story. In the 1950s a superintendent altered them, presumably because they were so severe. What they looked like before was almost lost. Between 2003 and 2008 Ian Andrew went looking for proof. He searched old photographs and sought construction documents, and found nothing. So he turned to the eldest members and asked them to remember. They described the lost greens by comparing them with ones still in play: the 4th had been like the 18th, they said, and the 11th like the 7th turned sideways. From those conversations Andrew made hand drawings of what the greens may have looked like. The drawings exist, waiting to be put to use one day. Andrew's work went well beyond that. He expanded the putting surfaces to recapture their full extent and brought old hole locations back into play. He took out trees, widened fairways and upgraded drainage across the course. A new irrigation system went in in 2004, and in 2009 the greens on the Old course were given new drainage. The Old course got its name in 1988, when Michael Hurdzan built a third nine. The club spreads over 384 acres. Its three nines, Pines, Willows and Falls, can be combined into three different eighteens, and Pines and Willows together form the original Travis layout. Falls is Hurdzan's. By 2010 Tom Marzolf, an associate designer for Tom Fazio and a former president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, had been brought in to renovate the bunkers, and in 2012 he completed a renovation program that improved drainage throughout the property, removed undesired grasses from the fairway fringes and built new green complexes and bunkers on the Old course. The bunkers are where the course argues with itself. In the 1920s Travis made quirky, chocolate-drop-styled bunkers. The ones there now differ in style from the fairways to the greens and bear no resemblance to his. They hardly dim the greens, but the mismatch is there to see. The club is now under the guidance of Brian Schneider, one of the foremost experts on Walter Travis. That seems right for a place that keeps looking back. In the men's grill room cigars are still a part of things, and the lingering smell stirs an old sensory memory the moment you walk into that old-school space. Out on the hills, those fifteen greens do much the same.