Maple Heights Golf & Country Club

Fayette County sits in the rolling hills of northeast Iowa, where the terrain carries enough natural contour to give a golf course genuine personality. This is working farmland at heart — corn and soybean country — but the land folds in ways that reward a course designer willing to let the ground do the talking. Maple Heights Golf & Country Club serves this corner of the state as a private members' club, the kind of place where a community invests in its own gathering spot rather than chasing outside attention.

Small-town private clubs like this one tend to develop a character all their own over the decades — a local shorthand for which holes play trickier than they look, which greens break toward the creek, which tee shot separates the members from their guests. That institutional knowledge lives in the membership, not on any scorecard.

Elma itself is a quiet agricultural community of a few hundred residents, and a club like this functions as more than just golf — it's a thread in the social fabric of the town.