Dearborn Heights has a 1920s Donald Ross golf course it bought to save

The golf course wedged into the middle of Dearborn Heights, with the Middle Rouge River snaking through it, was drawn up by one of the most famous course architects who ever lived. Donald Ross was the Scottish-born designer behind Pinehurst No. 2 and a long list of championship layouts. He laid out Warren Valley in the 1920s, when it opened under the name Hawthorne Valley. The first nine holes welcomed players on June 30, 1923, and the place grew to 36 holes split across an East and a West course.

That pedigree is easy to miss. For decades Warren Valley was a plain old county muni — the kind of affordable, slightly shaggy public course where leagues play after work and nobody mentions the architect. Wayne County bought it from its first developer in 1944 and ran it for most of a century. The river is the design’s signature. It comes into play on seven holes of the West course and four of the East. That’s exactly the kind of natural hazard Ross liked to build around instead of bulldozing.

Then in 2018 the course nearly stopped being a course. Developers eyed the land for housing, and a Ross design on the open market is the kind of thing that quietly vanishes into cul-de-sacs. Dearborn Heights stepped in. The city closed on buying the whole property from Wayne County that September, just to keep it green and public. In 2022 it handed operations to private managers, who reopened the course the next year after a renovation.

So a working-class suburb wound up owning a piece of golf history, along a river that’s mostly known for flooding basements. You can still tee off on a Donald Ross original in Dearborn Heights for the price of a municipal round — a hundred-year-old design hiding in plain sight off Warren Avenue.