From its inception, when the club provided a winter getaway for upper-tier families of New York, Philadelphia and New England, Ponte Vedra has relied on its size and scale to provide comforting service without relying too much on further expansion and development. The plan of the resort is based around a central boulevard, dotted, then as now, with walkers and cyclists, along which the resort amenities are comfortably and generously spaced. The buildings are not old, but the sight of their understated design calls up a time when vacationers made a more modest claim on Florida itself.

Straight as a small-town Main Street, within a hundred yards of the Atlantic, this road is the spine of Ponte Vedra, bringing to mind the broad sweep of an old boardwalk, rather than the artificially curved roadways of modern developments. Close to the water—mere steps really—the resort’s 200 oceanfront guest rooms and suites are nestled into two-story buildings more like classic  seafront residences than the contemporary condominiums dominating so much of Florida’s shoreline today.

Herbert Strong constructed the course to be a stern test, one that jutted its chin and invited the best in the world to take a swing. In its first decade, Ponte Vedra’s Ocean course was commonly ranked alongside the very tall oaks of American golf design—Pebble Beach, Oakmont, Pine Valley—and considered among the hardest courses in the country.

So quickly did its star rise that in 1939, 10 years after opening, the Ocean was tabbed to host a Ryder Cup. Fate took Strong’s new layout in a different direction, however, as the impending war cancelled transatlantic sporting events. During the World War II, the resort was redeployed as a USO site. In the years following, a young Robert Trent Jones Sr. was summoned to redesign the course, with an eye toward making it less severe for the recreational amateur.

What grew out of this redesign is the heart of the current layout, an expansive, unpredictable route that wends through a circuit of lagoons created many years earlier, when waterways filled the deep pits of the old mining operation. Eleven holes bring water into play, including the par-3 9th, reputed to be the first island-green hole in America. The course, and its sister Lagoon layout (built in 1961), present the brackish water of the lagoons as one challenge and the hulking, windblown presence of the ocean as an equal pressure. While you never quite stand along the beach to tee off at Ponte Vedra, whose shoreline is devoted to keeping guest lodgings luxuriously close to the surf, you cannot play the course without continually adjusting to ocean influences.