Tam O'Shanter Golf Course

Tam O'Shanter Golf Course in Hermitage is western Pennsylvania's most credentialed Golden-Age public track, an Emil Loeffler design that opened in 1929. Loeffler was Oakmont Country Club's longtime head superintendent (and later greenskeeper for the first 1935 U.S. Open at Oakmont), and Tam O'Shanter is his only surviving public-course design of significance, which puts it in a narrow category among Pennsylvania architecture-buff destinations. The course's calling card is the par-3 14th, nicknamed 'Death Valley', a downhill tee shot to a green guarded by deep bunkers in the Loeffler/Oakmont style. Tam O'Shanter hosted tour stops in the 1930s and 40s and has Arnold Palmer and Sam Snead in its club history (Palmer grew up 45 minutes south in Latrobe and played Tam as a junior; Snead played exhibition rounds here during the WPA era). The 6,488-yard par-70 layout plays short by modern standards but the Loeffler bunkering and small Oakmont-style greens make it legitimately testing. For the western Pennsylvania / Shenango Valley / Youngstown-border trip visitor, Tam O'Shanter is the architecture-first round, the Oakmont-adjacent Golden Age public that most traveling golfers have never heard of.