In 1938 the heirs of the Reynolds tobacco family offered Perry Maxwell a rare kind of freedom. The R.J. Reynolds estate in Winston-Salem, known as Reynolda, spread across 1,003 acres, and Maxwell had the pick of all of it. He chose 165: a hilly old horse farm, rolling enough to give the ground some voice but gentle enough that a golfer could walk it all afternoon and still want to come back the next morning. That choice is the first thing to understand about Old Town Club. The course begins with a man reading land and deciding that this particular piece of it held the golf he wanted to make. The club was founded by Mary Reynolds Babcock, daughter of R.J. Reynolds, and her husband Charles Babcock, an investor who did business with Clifford Roberts of Augusta National. In 1937 and 1938 Roberts had enlisted Maxwell to rebuild Augusta's seventh and 10th greens, and he then recommended Maxwell to Babcock for the Old Town project. The connection did not end with a recommendation. While the course was under construction, Roberts visited the site and encouraged Maxwell to merge the adjacent eighth and 17th greens into one impressive double green. That shared surface now serves as the focal point of the northwestern portion of the course, a broad stage where two holes meet on the same ground. The course opened in November 1939, one of the last and most brilliant expressions of Golden Age golf architecture. Maxwell himself deemed it "one of the seven finest" golf courses in the United States, and the words carry the pride of someone who believed in what he had made. Then came the slow blurring that time brings to many old courses. Maxwell's layout remained intact, but the club planted trees and modernized the bunkers and greens, and the fine details became smudged one decision at a time. The bones were still there, though the character was fading. In the early 2000s golf chairman Dunlop White III, who was also the restoration chairman at Roaring Gap Club, began pushing for course changes grounded in historical research. His effort culminated in 2013 in a restoration by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who recaptured Maxwell's naturalistic aesthetics, his rippling greens and the width-based strategy that lets a golfer choose a line rather than be handed one. In that work the 1939 course seemed to come back into view. More renovation followed recently, and the course is once again open for play. The Augusta link still draws comparisons. Yale golf coach Colin Sheehan put it plainly: "That's what Augusta wants to be." The remark lands because the two Southern clubs share a history, the same architect's hands on greens in both places and the same chairman's encouragement behind the double green here. Old Town holds to its own scale, the walkable rhythm of the old horse farm Maxwell chose. The course also has a neighbor that grew up beside it. In 1946 Wake Forest University moved next door to occupy a 350-acre gift of land from the Reynolds family. Just behind the 8-17 double green, to the left of the 12th tee, an unassuming pathway offers a way onto and off the course, and from there it is a short walk to the Arnold Palmer Golf Complex, the practice facility for the Wake Forest golf team. It would be easy to pass it by. Still, it says a good deal about this place: a course built on one family's estate, sitting beside a university that came to rest on that same family's land, with a quiet path joining the two across the ground Maxwell chose.