The Story
The land came first, and it came for the hunting. In the 1920s, Mercer Reynolds Sr. — who made his fortune inventing solidified cottonseed oil — began buying up Georgia Piedmont countryside between Atlanta and Augusta as a family hunting and fishing retreat he called Linger Longer. By the late 1930s the Reynolds family held roughly 12,000 acres of woods and creek bottoms, and for half a century that is all it was.
Then, in 1979, Georgia Power dammed the Oconee River, and the family's back forty became waterfront. Lake Oconee filled to 19,000 acres with some 374 miles of shoreline, and in the decades that followed the Reynolds family turned their retreat into one of the South's great golf destinations, collecting course designs from Jack Nicklaus, Tom Fazio, Bob Cupp, and Jim Engh along the way. In 2002 came the course that would carry the lake's own name: The Oconee, by Rees Jones — the 'Open Doctor' famous for sharpening U.S. Open venues, here building from scratch — opened alongside the new lakeside Ritz-Carlton.
The Oconee earned its championship credential in 2007, when it hosted the PGA Cup — the Ryder Cup of club professionals — and the United States edged Great Britain & Ireland 13½–12½ to reclaim the trophy. Jones returned in 2013 to renovate his own work, rebuilding all eighteen greens and opening up the tree lines so the lake shows itself more often.
In 2012 MetLife bought the property from the Reynolds family and soon retired the old Reynolds Plantation name; it has been Reynolds Lake Oconee since. What hasn't changed is the feeling the Oconee gives you: big Georgia pines, water glinting through the trees, and a closing stretch along the lake that makes everyone linger longer — which was, after all, the original idea.