The Story
Golf came to Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 1926, when the celebrated Chicago firm of William Langford and Theodore Moreau laid out nine holes above the shore of Lake Superior for the people of Marquette. That course served the iron-ore town for generations, and in 1969 David Gill added a second nine to complete what members now call the Heritage — a classic layout that still carries Langford & Moreau's Golden Age fingerprints.
By the early 2000s the old course was bursting at the seams, and the club made a decision that changed golf in the North: it would build a second eighteen on the wild ridge of granite and forest rising behind the property. Michigan architect Mike DeVries walked the land — exposed rock walls, tumbling glacial terrain, two hundred feet of elevation change, and Lake Superior filling the horizon — and routed a course through it rather than over it.
Greywalls opened in 2005, named for the grey granite outcroppings that edge its fairways and squeeze its corners, and the golf world took notice immediately: every major golf publication put it on its best-new-courses list that year. Two decades on, it is routinely ranked among the finest courses anyone can play in Michigan — a state with no shortage of competition.
What makes Marquette special is the pairing: a century-old Langford & Moreau heirloom and a modern masterpiece sharing one clubhouse at the edge of the world's largest freshwater lake. Golfers drive hours across the U.P. for it, and the ones who make the trip tend to talk about it for years.