Laurel Valley Golf Club

Laurel Valley Golf Club opened in 1959 in Ligonier Township, in the Laurel Highlands of Westmoreland County, co-founded by a group of Pittsburgh-area businessmen that included Arnold Palmer, who had grown up and continued to live a few miles away in Latrobe. Dick Wilson designed the original course, with Palmer himself later contributing renovation work -- a fitting pairing given Palmer's lifelong ties to the club and the surrounding Laurel Highlands. Laurel Valley's championship résumé is exceptional for a club its size: it hosted the 1965 PGA Championship and, a decade later, the 1975 Ryder Cup, one of a small number of Pennsylvania venues to have hosted a Ryder Cup.

Despite that pedigree, Laurel Valley reads as historically golf-only-by-design, the same pattern the brief flags for Merion and Oakmont: no purpose-built or membership-tied residential development was found on or adjacent to the club's grounds. A property called '99 Pines' in the nearby 'Loyalhannon Plan' subdivision sits across from the club, but that reads as a general Ligonier-area residential neighborhood rather than a golf-bundled community tied to Laurel Valley membership.