In the annals of golf development, shiny new builds generate the lion’s share of attention. The fascination with modern, state-of-the-art golf courses boasting substantial yardage and renowned contemporary designers runs deep as a drive that appears to soar over an endless fairway towards an uncharted horizon.

Newly opened Fields Ranch, the centerpiece of Omni PGA Frisco Resort’s $520 million development in the Blackland prairies of North Texas, even landed a pair of majors, scoring the 2027 and 2034 PGA Championships months before the first tee shots were even hit.

But Dallas based TRT Holdings, the owner of the Omni hotel chain, seems to grasp the timeless truism that old gems can also sparkle anew. The fountain of youth being a major capital investment. The finishing touches on a $150 million property-wide upgrade currently being applied at the Omni Homestead Resort is set to be complete in the fall. The makeover spruced up all aspects of the grand ole hotel from gussying up the guest rooms to revamping the restaurants and making myriad façade improvements.

The major refresh coincides with the property’s highly touted Cascades Course, one of two eighteen-hole tracks on the property, celebrating its centennial this year. The mountain stunner wends through Falling Springs Valley in the foothills of the Allegheny range, taking players on a trip back to the golden age of golf back before bulldozers, when the grunt work of course construction was accomplished with horses and scrapers and a sloped setting meant challenging uneven lies would abound.

William Flynn, a golden age architect from the Philadelphia school of golf course design, was the mastermind behind the course. A maverick with a background in agronomy and construction, he brought a rare 360 degree view of course creation and innovation—he holds the patent for the famous wicker basket pins used at Merion.

Flynn, who dubbed himself 'the Natural Faker' due to his remarkable knack for seamlessly integrating existing terrain and deftly incorporating manmade landforms or relocated creeks, ensured that the alterations he made melded flawlessly, giving the impression they had always been part of the landscape.

A testament to the quality of his handiwork, over 100 USGA events have been staged on his designs. Ahead of his era, he also presaged the ball rollback debate by decades, predicting that if ball flight wasn’t crimped, 7500 to 8000 yard-golf courses would become the norm.

Beyond the design pedigree, this is the slice of secluded God’s country where Slammin’ Sammy Snead, deadlocked with Tiger Woods for most career PGA Tour wins, taught lessons for nearly six decades. He earned his alliterative nickname at the Cascades by driving the green on the first hole on multiple occasions. Snead, born just a mile and a half from the course, where verdant ribbons of green fairway slalom through magnificent forested mountains and uneven lies and elevation changes necessitate shrewd shot making command to go low. Snead famously said of the Cascades: “if you can play here, you can play anywhere” and “if I could play only one course, this would be it."

Currently filling Snead’s former role as head professional is Barry Ryder, who has worked on the property for four decades in various capacities and previously served as the director of golf. During that last stint, one major endeavor which began to be implemented five years was to harken the course back to its original 1923 setup ahead of the course reaching the century mark.

“We got the original blueprints from William Flynn’s granddaughter and we overlaid that with Google Maps and then went in a cleared a bunch of a trees and reshaped fairways. There were a couple holes that had split fairways with rough in the middle and we incorporated those back. We also reincorporated the 15^th tee, a par 3, behind the 14^th green and we use it for special events and tournaments,” Ryder said.

Cutting back stands of trees in general, in the services of giving golfers more wide-open vistas on tee boxes and space on approach shots into the green also helped to bring back its roaring 1920’s vibe back before bulldozers when the grunt work of course construction was accomplished with horses and scrapers.

“One of the things that Flynn was good at was your long views and the Cascades had gotten claustrophobic. On No. 8 there were pine trees behind the green and you couldn’t see any more of the golf course. Now you can see onto No 9 and it’s the same thing on No. 4,” Ryder added.

Already established architectural giants of the day, Peter W. Lees followed by A.W. Tillinghast scoped out those same gorgeous vistas when the Homestead consulted them in succession, but both would pass on the project. Ostensibly, this was due to the construction difficulties of working with the site.

Flynn, still largely unknown and building his reputation, jumped at the opportunity to flex his engineering ingenuity. In roughly a year he shepherded dynamite crews, plow teams, and plumbers among other specialists to pulverize rock, grade the land and install miles of pipe for an irrigation system. There may have been some former log rollers helping out as when confronted with a brick house sitting smack dab in the middle of where the first fairway was going in, they didn’t rush to raze it.

“They kept the whole house intact, put it on round logs and rolled it down a hill to where is currently today the 15^th tee box. That’s pretty cool for the 1920s, to roll a two-story house out of the way to make room for the first hole,” Ryder said.

The tab for the entire build came to $140,000, a sum equivalent to around $2.5 million in today’s money. The reason the figure may feel like a relative bargain is that a great deal of the labor was sourced from the Homestead resort and dirt was hauled in from the adjacent mountains to shape the fairways. To celebrate the centennial, range attendants have dressed up in plus-fours and throwback pin-flags and 150-yard stakes are being utilized.

Looking ahead the Cascasdes Course, which has played host to eight USGA championships over its history, including a U.S. Women’s Open, will be taking that tally in to the double digits by the end of the decade. The golf association has chosen the Cascades to host the 2025 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur and it will welcome the senior men four years later.