Thirty miles north of Chicago, where Lake Bluff became a summer refuge for the city in the late 1800s, there is a golf course that seems to have quietly declined to join the century it now finds itself in. Shoreacres is a museum piece in the best sense, kin to Chicago Golf Club and Old Elm. Here the past is not displayed behind glass. It is walked across, putted on, and argued with. It began as a kind of courtesy. Stanley Field was the nephew of Marshall Field, whose famous department store bore the family name. He joined a group from Lake Forest's Onwentsia Club to found a club where they could play golf with their wives. They called it Lakewoods at first. Within a few weeks of opening it had become Shoreacres, renamed to avoid confusion with another club nearby. Seth Raynor took up the work. He was building Camargo in the same era and would go on to Yale and Fishers Island. The course carries the year 1919, when Raynor built it. It also carries 1921, when he completed it after a delay brought by the First World War. For a time the members dressed in naval barracks, until David Adler gave them the clubhouse beside Lake Michigan that still sets the tone on arrival. Coming up to it, you half expect to hear a phonograph from the 1920s. The land is the thing. It is one of the most interesting plots in the area. Ravines and creeks cut through the property, and Raynor used the topography cleverly. The fairways are narrow and lined with trees, and the greens are large, fast, and heavily bunkered. The whole arrangement rewards the golfer who places the ball rather than the one who launches it. Its particular virtue is its evenness, the way the fairways flow with enough variety to keep a player on guard. It is a little short by the standards of today's star player, and it does not care. Its heart is the run from the 10th through the 15th, regarded as Raynor's finest. It opens with a 452-yard version of the Road Hole, out of bounds waiting to the right. Then comes the 11th, with its forced carry, and with it a story worth telling. A founding member came out early, saw that carry, and threatened to resign unless Raynor changed the hole. Raynor left the hole alone. The member left the club. You can still stand on that tee and imagine both men's convictions in the air. The stretch closes at the 15th, the signature, a scenic 521-yard par five that asks for nerve straight away. The tee shot must boldly carry a ravine if you hope to reach the green in two. Even then, finding the green is not straightforward. Bunkers guard both sides of a putting surface that slopes from back to front. It is not the toughest hole on the property, and that is the point. It is a supremely strategic short par five that gives you every chance to be brave and then makes you account for it. What may be most remarkable about Shoreacres is what it refused. Over the years architects came with proposals to revise it, and the club resisted. Instead it chose restoration and brought in Tom Doak, whose Renaissance Design took up the work. That restoration is tied to 1993 and to the early 2000s, and it involved managing trees, expanding fairways, and enlarging greens. The superintendent Brian Palmer ushered in an era of outstanding playing conditions. He later went on to direct agronomy at Tara Iti in New Zealand. So the course remains what that departed founding member could not accept. It is still Raynor's, with the lake beside it and a century of patience in the turf.