There is a mile of road between Southampton Golf Club and the Southampton Cemetery, where Seth Raynor lies beside his mentor, C.B. Macdonald. It is a short distance, and it says a good deal about this course. Southampton proudly claims to be the only golf club where Raynor was a member. He came into the world in Southampton or in neighboring Manorville, and Southampton was where he spent most of his life, working as a civil engineer and helping develop the town before golf claimed him. When the town wanted a course of its own, it turned to one of its own to draw it. By 1923 Southampton already had two famous neighbors, Shinnecock Hills and the National Golf Links of America. A group of residents met that year to talk about a third course, one for those who could not get into either. Nearly fifteen years after Raynor's first foray into golf design with Macdonald at the National, he was hired to build something just a stone's throw away. He drew the plans in 1925. He died in 1926, and his engineer, Charles Baird, carried the work through to opening day in 1927. So the club's founding holds both an arrival and a loss. Raynor's hometown course was one he never saw played. What he left behind is a generous run of his templates: Short, Maiden, Knoll, Raynor's Prize, Redan, Double Plateau, Eden, Long, Biarritz, Punchbowl, and Road. They are not lined up like exhibits. The routing dances between open country and forest. The second and third holes slip into the trees, the fourth through seventh open onto wide ground, eight through eleven head back into the woods, and twelve through eighteen run out under the sky again. The round feels like an adventure with chapters, each change of light marking a new one. The course has not always looked like itself. In the late 1960s the club brought in William Mitchell to modernize it. The cross bunkers were removed, rows of trees were planted along the fairways, and the greenside bunkers were raised, drastically changing the course from its original Raynor look. Luckily, the green surfaces were largely left untouched. In 2004 Brian Silva wrote a master plan, and over the following years the club worked its way back. The greens, which had become shrunken ovals, were returned to their original shapes and sizes, hundreds of trees came down, and the bunkers were rebuilt in Raynor's style. Today the course is a terrific representation of a Raynor design. Even so, it is easy to miss. With Shinnecock and the National so close by, Southampton remains largely unappreciated, which is a shame, though it is just how this private club likes it. Its neighbors draw national members and New York elites. Southampton's membership is mostly local firemen, lawyers, golf superintendents, and other everyday people, which is the country club for local people the club was founded to be. Even the logo points home. Guests sometimes look around the property for the windmill on the club's emblem, but it stands in the center of town. It once filled one quadrant of the original crest, and when the design was simplified, the windmill was the part they kept. That fits a club bound so closely to Southampton, and to the local man who drew the course and now rests a mile up the road.