The Harvester began as a question that Dickson Jensen could not leave alone. Why was there no golf course in Iowa that could stand beside the best in the country? Jensen, a developer who loved the game, answered it the slow way. He spent about a year searching, gathered four separate parcels of land northeast of Des Moines, and went looking for a Midwestern architect. The choice came down to Dick Nugent of Chicago and Keith Foster of St. Louis. Foster got the job, and in 2000 The Harvester opened. It may be the finest original course he ever made. The ambition was simple to say and hard to do: set the course into the land, leave it as natural as possible, and let the rolling Iowa farmland and the broad lake decide where the interest would be. The course sits within a residential development, and homestead properties surround it. You would expect to feel them. You mostly don't. The fairways run out across rolling prairie with little sign of the houses nearby, and the land rises and falls with an unhurried rhythm that belongs to the place. From the back tees it stretches to 7,340 yards, and it is a stern, demanding test. The lake does its finest work at the close of each nine. The 9th, a par four called "Wish and a Prayer," keeps water along the left of the fairway before the lake cuts straight across the hole 150 yards short of the green. Then the round ends in a long embrace with the water. The 17th, "The Thresher," is a par three to a peninsula green pushed out into the lake, the kind of tee shot that makes knees tremble. The 18th, "Promised Land," is a par five whose second shot must find an island fairway, a strip of safety that launches the approach home. The names carry a feeling of field and church, and they suit a closing stretch that asks for both labor and faith. Jensen once described the course this way: "Compared to some of the most famous courses in the world, we recognize that The Harvester is young. But the course design, the surroundings, the commitment to tradition and the game of golf... it all lends to a maturity and a degree of excellence beyond our years." The course was built on time and within budget, the product of a close working relationship between architect and owner, and Foster kept coming back. About a decade after opening he renovated bunkers, taking out the rounded modern look in favor of natural, worn edges, and he altered tees and added stone walls along the lake. Over the years Jensen's affection for classical architecture kept growing, and public play had been thinning. In 2018 the course closed entirely so Foster could reimagine it in the spirit of the Golden Age courses of the 1920s and 30s. Those were hard years for the architect. His legal troubles cost him work at Congressional and Olympia Fields, but he went on working at The Harvester. When it reopened in 2019, it was no longer the high-end daily-fee course that had welcomed Des Moines golfers. It was a private club, newly made to look old. What the members got is a course that asks a great deal. Tees and fairways are mown astonishingly short, slick enough to rival the greens at an ordinary muni, and the greens themselves regularly run at 13 or more on the Stimpmeter. The turf is firm, and the ball bounds and runs as if the prairie wind had polished it. Play is limited each day, so the rolling ground can feel like yours alone. A pitch-and-putt with holes under 50 yards is being added beside the entrance road, behind the range, a place for wedge and putter only. Even those who admire The Harvester may find it impressive but flawed. Still, it was built to answer the question Jensen asked at the start. It wanted to be great, and it kept remaking itself in pursuit of something timeless and enduring.