U.S. Open 2025: What's the deal with this turnpike running through Oakmont? A mildly entertaining Q&A

I write today with some trepidation, since it feels like there is going to be a lot of Pennsylvania Turnpike content this week at the U.S. Open and I don't want to be repetitive, but—what the hell—I think I have something new to offer for all you golf and transportation and history sickos out there. For those unaware, Oakmont Country Club has a turnpike running through it, and though at first I approached the topic casually, it wasn't long before the rabbit hole got me. It turns out I am a sucker for Interstate content, and the result is that I am now bursting with dangerous amounts of information. Nobody else who writes about this road will go to the unsettling lengths of what you're about to read. If you are a metaphorical car plunging through a dark tunnel deep in the Allegheny Mountains, this post is the accelerator that will speed you into the glaring light on the other side, and you will emerge a changed soul … and possibly a little damaged.

So let's do this thing, Q&A style, because this simple highway is more interesting than it has any right to be.

Q: OK, give me the basics. I am a busy person with many important meetings to attend. Why should I care about this measly little stretch of road?

A: Well, first off, as far as we can tell, Oakmont Country Club is the only prestigious country club in America with a U.S. interstate running directly through the middle of the course. Not around it, not near it, but through. I did a whole podcast about how Oakmont is a sneaky weird place, and aside from the very real ghosts that haunt the land, this is probably the weirdest thing about it. The highway in question is the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the chunk of I-76 that lies in—you guessed it—Pennsylvania, running from Philadelphia in the east, along the southern corridor through Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and then shooting northwest to the Ohio border.

Observe, and ignore the light blue line, because I'm told by reliable sources in the state that only chumps take I-80:

Just south of the Allegheny River, to the northeast of Pittsburgh, the highway cuts right through Oakmont. Should you ever be fortunate enough to play this exclusive track, you will start off west of the highway on the first hole, cross one of two footbridges to the second tee, play holes two through eight on the east side of the highway, then cross back on the same footbridges to the west to play the remainder of the course:

Here's a tight view of the first green, second tee, eighth green, and ninth tee from Golf Digest's lovely "Every Hole At" segment:

Q: Can you see the course from the road? Can you see the road from the course? Can you see the roase from the courd?

A: Courtesy of Google street view, here's what you'll see if you're driving north, just past Hulton Road and in view of the first of the two footbridges, "Oakmont CC East," and just before the second, "Oakmont CC West" (please do not ask me why they're called "east" and "west" despite being almost perfectly north and south of each other):

It's not a good view of the course. It's not any view of the course, actually, because it's too low, almost like a tunnel or (spoiler alert!) a railroad bed. And even though Oakmont isn't exactly trying to disguise the fact that there's a big highway in its midst—you can see all the cars from the footbridges, and sick, depraved men like Rory Sabbatini have even wondered aloud how many wrecks you could cause if you dumped a bucket of range balls on the cars—from certain angles it's artfully disguised. I mean, look at this view from the first fairway … that's the Interstate in the drop-off past the green, but you wouldn't really know it:

The only thing is, from certain vantages, especially the eighth green, you can hear the traffic. It's a good thing the cars can't see the course, because if the drivers are anything like the absolute dolts who drive past the range at my course, they'd be honking up a storm. Idiots.

Q: How did this happen? Aren't the Oakmont people very rich, and don't very rich people pay to avoid things like having a highway run through their nice golf course?

A: Let me ask you a question. Do you like trains?

Q: Who doesn't like trains?

A: Exactly. Let me take you back to the year 1904, when a man named Henry Fownes who you'll probably hear a lot about this week, formed, with a few others, the "Oakmont Land Company." Their aim was to buy 191 acres of land in Oakmont for $72,000. Speaking of which, you'll hear a lot of different figures for both the acreage and the price. I am reluctantly trusting Oakmont's own website, even though contemporary newspaper accounts gave very different numbers:

Fownes was a steel titan of the time, one of those classic self-made Daniel Plainview "I drink your milkshake!" type men who believe triumph and glory should only be won through great struggle, and who I believe is still haunting the course, ghost-style, with his equally uncompromising son. When Fownes was 15, his dad died, he quit school, got into the steel biz, married well, made a ton of money when he sold an iron furnace to Andrew Carnegie and then got super into golf because a doctor told him he had heart disease and should quit working (he didn't have heart disease). He and his other rich friends got tired of playing their rinky-dink nine-hole tracks and wanted to build something epic, so they bought this land from the heirs of a farmer named Caleb Lee and built a truly insane "inland links" course with more than 300 bunkers and greens that were, frankly, too fast for humans. It is also worth noting that based on the style of the course and the clubhouse, it appears Fownes was afflicted with a nasty Scotland fetish.

Q: Did newspaper accounts of the time comically misspell his name in various ways in reporting the land purchase?

A: Oh yeah. Glad you asked, it was a real smorgasbord of Fownes variants. We got "Frownes," "Founds" and my favorite, "Forones":

Journalism seems to have been a mess back then. Luckily, we're now perfect.

Q: You promised me trains, though.

A: Oh yes. Well, first, canoes. Did you know when they advertised this new country club, they talked a lot about canoeing and sculling on the Allegheny and barely mentioned golf? Look:

Q: Did they ever actually canoe and/or scull?

A: No idea. But that's basically the last you'll hear of canoes in any Oakmont narrative. (If anyone has information on canoe culture at the club, please be in touch; I guarantee anonymity.) They didn't even use the Allegheny River in the design of their course! A whole river at their disposal, and it's a mere afterthought!

Q: TRAINS!

A: Yes, OK. The trains are important here. The land Fownes and Co. bought was pretty ideal for golf, with one nagging blemish—there was a dang train running right through the property. Check out this overhead photo of the eastern half of Oakmont from the late 1920s, courtesy of David Moore, the Curator of Collections at Oakmont, and notice the railroad tracks in the lower left, down in the bed:

That's the Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad, running from the Lake Erie port town of Conneaut, Ohio, all the way down to Penn Hills by Pittsburgh. (It evolved from the Shenango and Allegheny Railroad, which I only mention because that's a very cool railroad name.) It's owned by the Canadian National Railway today, but back when it got its current name in 1900, it was owned by Andrew Carnegie himself, and as you might guess if you know a little about western Pennsylvania history, it was designed to move steel and iron products to his factories around Pittsburgh, and to take coal away. By 1901, it was owned by U.S. Steel and an even bigger American titan, J.P. Morgan. In other words, the railroad was around before Oakmont Country Club. Here's another photo from Moore of the railroad being built that the file says was taken around 1880 or 1890. For what it's worth, other documents I've read seem to indicate the Oakmont section of the railroad was completed around 1897, to connect the existing B&LE RR with east Pittsburgh via an Allegheny River crossing:

Obviously, steel was big money at the time, and when Fownes and his buddies bought their land at Oakmont, the railroad wasn't going anywhere. It is unlikely that the Fownes crew ever even entertained the thought of asking Mr. Morgan to take his train and skedaddle.

Q: You've scratched my train itch, and I thank you for that, but it's still unclear what any of this has to do with the interstate.

A: The thing is, it takes a lot of work to build a railroad, and part of that work is carving a path through various obstacles (as you see in the image above), tunneling through mountains, and etc. And so, when future projects like a highway come about, and that hard work is already done, why reinvent the wheel?

Let us now jump ahead to the mid-1930s, when a group of powerful officials in Pennsylvania started vision-boarding the concept of crossing the state's Appalachian mountains by car. They ran that by FDR's Works Progress Administration, got the thumbs-up and then passed it through the state legislature. Fast forwarding through much bureaucracy and millions of dollars and the boring of various tunnels, in October 1940 the first 160-mile stretch opened between Carlisle and Irwin. As you see here, it stopped just short of Pittsburgh and therefore Oakmont:

To give the Turnpike its historical due, this was one of the first really big highways in the country. The Interstate system wouldn't come until later—it was not yet called I-76—and this was sufficiently ahead of its time that they called it "America's first superhighway" and "Grandfather of the Interstate System." (Note: The Turnpike had no speed limit at the beginning, except in the tunnels. It must have been chaos. Thrilling to imagine.)

From there, it was only a matter of time before they expanded the Turnpike both eastward and westward to span the whole state. On Aug. 7, 1951, 11 more miles opened north of Irwin, bringing the turnpike to the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville just south of Oakmont, like a slow moving but inevitable army conquering the surrounding kingdoms.

By then, Oakmont's fate had long been decided. The railroad bed running through the course and over the Allegheny River was perfect for the Interstate, and in late July 1949, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette outlined exactly how they'd build the bridge across the river. They even included a nice map of where the turnpike would go:

And by Dec. 26, 1951, the western extension had opened, finally connecting Monroeville all the way to the Ohio border:

Q: Didn't Oakmont fight it??? How did these extremely rich guys allow this to happen?

A: Here's the thing: When Big Gubment gets a head of steam, as when they're building a multi-million-dollar superhighway, there's no stopping them. Because the train tracks had already done the hard work of establishing a convenient path, and because it was in the perfect spot for their Turnpike, it was fait accompli from the start. And you can't stand in their way, even if you're Oakmont Country Club.

Why? The short answer is a concept called "eminent domain," which Wikipedia conveniently summarizes as "the compulsory acquisition of private property for public use." It is very controversial, and a lot of people don't like it. Pore through the archives at the time, and you can find stories like this one, where dairy farmers, upset that a critical road for their market was being cut off by the construction of the Turnpike, blocked the workers by lining up tractors and other machinery along the road as a protest:

That's just the tip of the iceberg. When the entire Interstate system was constructed after Eisenhower's 1956 Highway Act, more than a million people were displaced. But despite a few successful "freeway revolts" in the U.S., eminent domain is basically unbeatable. The deal is, if the government wants your land, they offer a "fair market value," and if you refuse, they take you to court and get it anyway. The minute the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission Act was signed into law in 1937, Oakmont was screwed, Interstate-wise.

That was the dire situation they faced, and I could not find any indication that they ever put up much of a public fight, even though it had to be disheartening to learn that a literal Interstate would be carving your lovely country club in half. That's quite a change from a nice rustic train coming through twice a day! As far as any fight from the club, I asked Dave Moore, the Curator of Collections, and he couldn't find any record of public opposition either. There may have been some board meeting gripes, but it never spilled out into real action.

(It is interesting to note that by that time, W.C. Fownes, the son of Henry Fownes who was just as extreme as his old man and went around saying things like, "Let the clumsy, the spineless, the alibi artist stand aside! A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost!" had resigned his club membership and was close to death, i.e. not in fighting shape. It's highly unlikely he could have done anything to stop the highway, but it would almost certainly have been way more entertaining than what actually happened, which is nothing.)

Q: Did the club get anything for their trouble?

A: Yes! Moore consulted a book called "Oakmont Country Club: The First Seventy-Seven Years," written in 1980 by a member named Edward B. Foote, and according to Foote, Oakmont was paid $70,000 for the little slivers of land they had to give up, and the state agreed to build them a new footbridge over the Interstate and give them exclusive use of it. That project was finished in late June 1951, a few months before the Turnpike even opened.

Q: What changed about the course?

A: Very little. The existence of the railroad before the Turnpike meant most of the land used for I-76 was already part of the railroad's right-of-way rather than the golf course. They lost some small amount of land off the second and ninth tee, and had to move the eighth green somewhere between 30 feet and 30 yards, according to Moore.

Tragically, the train tracks also had to move:

As you see, the railroad finances weren't great either. However, I'm happy to report that the Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad is still carrying iron ore to Braddock, Pa. And if you're in Oakmont this week and driving over the Allegheny River on the Turnpike, make sure to look east and check out the railroad bridge. It's not bad:

Q: Speaking of bridges, how many ways are there to get over this Turnpike?

A: Back in the day, when it was just a railroad, players would just mosey south to Hulton Road to get from the first green to the second tee, and then again from the eighth green to ninth tee. Eventually they built a footbridge in the 1920s, and as mentioned above that footbridge was replaced by the state when they put in the highway. After the 1994 U.S. Open, under threat of never hosting another due to bottlenecked foot traffic, a member and hedge fund giant named Stanley Druckenmiller cut the club a check to build a second, wider bridge. That's the "Oakmont CC East" and "Oakmont CC West" discussed above. There are also some steps that run to the shoulder of Hulton Road, so you can cross that way too, like the players of old, should the mood strike.

Q: What an adventure this has been! Highways, trains, bridges, rivers, canoes, tunnels, it had everything. What are the long-lasting lessons we can take from the parable of Oakmont Country Club and the Turnpike?

A: First, you can't stand in the way of a highway. Don't even try. If a highway's coming? Take the money and run, my friend. Second, you have to tip your cap to Oakmont for rolling with the punches on this one. A literal Interstate bisecting your course is kind of a disaster, but they've made the best of it, and now it's a fun thing that adds character and that we can write a 2,800 Q&A post about. Third, let us praise humanity for the ongoing highway-course truce, in which motorists don't flagrantly honk while driving past Oakmont, and people crossing the footbridges don't dump buckets of range balls to cause multi-car pile-ups. There is hope for us yet, here on the eve of the 125th U.S. Open.