The soil under the 11th green at the 2026 PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club could not legally be installed as fresh fill in a brand new green today. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection would reject it. The course gets to keep the soil because Pennsylvania’s land recycling law grandfathered existing operational sites in 1995. The golf course superintendent maintaining that grandfather property for the 2026 PGA Championship is named John Gosselin.
He’s been at Aronimink for 20 years. He knows what the Pennsylvania DEP’s fill standards say. He also knows he’ll never have to meet it. That’s not a bureaucratic footnote.
That’s the entire operating context for the 11th green this week. Aronimink Golf Club was built in 1928. Donald Ross designed it, the same Donald Ross who created Pinehurst number two. The greens were constructed the way every American golf course built before 1960 was constructed.
Native Pennsylvania topsoil pushed up into a crown shape for drainage then seeded. No engineered drainage layer, no sand profile, no USGA construction specification, just the ground that was already there formed into a green. That ground has been under continuous turf maintenance since the club opened. For most of that time the chemistry applied to control insects and disease was EPA canceled before this century began.
When you watch the 11th hole this week, you’re watching a PGA Championship being played on a soil profile that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s own fill regulations would not permit as fresh fill in a new construction project today. The green is legal. The grandfathering makes it legal. The soil profile would not be.
Every tournament morning John Gosselin’s crew is on the 11th green before the first tee time. Walking rollers specific to the greens contour, specific to the firmest conditions Gosselin has set for that day’s conditions. The mowers come in at heights calibrated to to the USGA’s championship setup team has communicated for the week. The bent grass on the 11th is tight, uniform, and fast.
Gosling has spent 20 years learning exactly how that green responds to moisture, heat, and foot traffic during tournament conditions. He hasn’t spent 20 years wondering what’s under his feet. He knows. The soil profile of a push-up green built from native Pennsylvania topsoil in 1928 and maintained under industry standard chemistry through the 1980s is documented.
What went in didn’t come back out. Lead doesn’t leach through soil in meaningful quantities. The USGA research record and the university extension science community both documented the same way. Lead arsenate applications accumulate in the upper 12 to 18 inches of a push-up green’s native soil and stay.
They don’t migrate to groundwater. They don’t disperse. They concentrate in the rooting zone. If you’re watching on YouTube and you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now.
There are eight agronomic videos on this channel this week. What you’re about to learn here changes how you walk every old course you’ve ever played. In 1916, a Japanese beetle was identified at a nursery in Riverton, New Jersey. It was the first confirmed detection of the species in the United States.
Within a few years, the beetle had spread across much of New Jersey and was moving into Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the county Agronomic sits in. By the mid-1920s, the Japanese beetle was an active turf management pressure on golf courses across the Mid-Atlantic, destroying fairways and greens in a region that had built dozens of new clubs in the previous decade. Golf course superintendents needed a response the USGA Green Section could recommend. B.
R. Leach, an entomologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, spent four years conducting research on insecticide applications for Japanese beetle control in turfgrass. His findings appeared in the Bulletin of the USGA Green Section with a specific recommendation, lead arsenate applied at 3 and 1/2 lb per 100 sq ft. The USGA’s Green Section, founded in November 1920, was the dominant technical authority on American golf course agronomy.
Its bulletin was the primary guidance document for how golf course superintendents in the United States managed their properties. When Leaches recommendation appeared in the bulletin, courses operating under USGA Green Section guidance applied it. Walter Fleming, also with the USDA, compiled over decade of experimental application data and published it in January 1942 as Technical Bulletin 788. Fleming’s work documented application rates, timing, and efficacy data across multiple turf sites.
It gave superintendents a formal research record for a practice that had already become standard on golf courses throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Superintendents could cite it. Aronimink, opened in 1928, the club operated under USGA Green Section guidance. The Japanese beetle pressure in Delaware County was not hypothetical.
It was a documented pest problem that every superintendent in the region was managing. By 1962, when Gary Player won the PGA Championship at Aronimink, the course had been applying lead arsenate for decades under standard industry practice. Arsenate is an inorganic compound. Approximately 60% of its mass is lead and arsenic combined, with both elements present at roughly equal molar proportions, as documented in the soil science literature through the 1990s.
When applied to turf grass and worked into the surface layer through mowing, top dressing, and decades of foot traffic, lead and arsenic separate from the compound over time. The compound half-life is approximately 16 years, according to US Fish and Wildlife Biological reports on lead arsenate fate in treated soils. Lead and arsenic don’t follow the compound timeline. Lead binds to soil particles.
Arsenic behaves similarly, remaining immobile within the upper 20 to 25 cm of the soil profile. The University of Massachusetts Amherst Extension Program, which has published guidance on lead in garden and turf grass soils, characterized the persistence this way, “Lead remains in soil for many hundreds of years, not decades, not a generation, many hundreds of years.” In 1947, DDT became the preferred replacement for lead arsenate across American agriculture and turf grass management and applications declined but didn’t stop uniformly across the industry. Mercury-based fungicides for snow mold and cool season turf disease also entered the chemistry profile through the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. The EPA canceled the last mercury turf fungicides in 1994.
On August 1st, 1988, the EPA canceled all insecticidal uses of lead arsenate under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act amendments of that year. You can’t buy it today. You can’t apply it. The registration is gone.
Every application that was ever made to agronomic soil was made legally with a registered product under current guidance at the time. Mike Kenna, who served as director of research for the USGA Green Section before retiring, documented the original leach recommendation from the bulletin archive held at Michigan State University’s Turf Grass Information Center. The primary record exists. The recommendation was published, the applications happened.
In 1995, Pennsylvania passed Land Recycling and Environmental Remediation Standards Act, Act 2. The law established what every construction site in Pennsylvania now requires before moving fill, soil core samples, laboratory analysis against lead and arsenic thresholds, documented chain of custody. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Management of Fill Policy, developed under Act 2, established that soil exceeding the statewide health standard for lead cannot be used as fresh fill in new construction anywhere in Pennsylvania. As of November 2021, Pennsylvania’s residential statewide health standard for lead in soil is 500 mg per kilogram.
The state’s DEP has proposed revising that figure down to approximately 200 mg per kilogram. The revision is still in process. Any construction project in Pennsylvania attempting to build a new golf green today using soil with the lead and arsenic accumulation profile that USGA guided turf management generated in native topsoil between 1928 and 1988 would not clear that fill review. The chemistry history of the soil is the problem.
Documented, the DEP’s own fill standards would stop a new construction project cold. But Act 2 has a mechanism. Existing operational sites, places that were functioning before the remediation standards were codified, aren’t automatically ordered to remediate. The law’s trigger for a required cleanup is a release event, a property transfer for non-golf use, or redevelopment activity.
Agronomics 11th green isn’t releasing lead into a drainage basin. It’s not changing hands for development. It’s a golf green. It stays grandfathered.
The Pennsylvania DEP’s fill standards never get activated. John Gosselin works inside this regulatory architecture because the law recognized that you can’t retroactively apply 1995 construction fill standards to soil that was placed in 1928. Now, Augusta National. In 1981, Augusta National Golf Club converted its playing surfaces from Bermuda grass to bentgrass.
Billy Fuller, who was part of the Augusta agronomy team through that transition and later served as the club superintendent, has described the conversion publicly. The shift to bentgrass came with a rebuild of Augusta’s push-up greens to USGA construction specifications. Same era of push-up construction, same chemistry history, same accumulation potential in the original soil. But in 1981, Augusta’s agronomy team excavated the original soil profile and replaced it with an engineered specification-compliant growing medias.
Fuller called it the beginning of a new era for the club and the tournament. Augusta’s greens were built legal in 1981. The pre-war soil came out when Gil Hanse’s team began the 2017 restoration of Aronimink. The club made a different call.
Hanse expanded the 11th green back to its 1928 dimensions, recovering pin at the front right and front left that had been pinched out over decades. Across all 18 greens, the restoration returned roughly 30,000 sq ft of green surface to playable use. What Hanse’s crew didn’t do is rebuild the subgrade. The restoration returned the playing surface to the same native Pennsylvania topsoil that had been under the original green since Ross’s construction crews finished in 1928.
The chemistry profile came with it. Augusta built legal in 1981. Aronimink got grand- fathered in 1995. Both are hosting championship golf this week.
Same bent grass surface, same afternoon bow and rotation. Different relationship to the core sample you’d pull from 18 inches down. Both clubs understand what John Gosselin and every championship superintendent manage. The Wanamaker Trophy will be awarded on greens that reflect decades of agronomic decisions made long before anyone imagined modern environmental regulations.
Every American golf course built before the Second World War has a version of this soil profile. The USGA’s chemistry recommendations didn’t apply only to Aronimink. They applied wherever USGA agronomists published and wherever golf course superintendents followed the green section bulletin. Every club that applied the lead arsenate recommendation through the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and into the chemical transition of the ’50s.
Every course that never rebuilt its greens from the subgrade. Every course still operating on its original native topsoil. Your course superintendent, if the course you play was built before the war and hasn’t been through a full green reconstruction, knows what’s in his soil. He’s not managing around it.
He’s managing because of it. The chemistry that’s there shapes how the soil behaves, how organic matter accumulates, how water moves through the profile at depth. It’s part of what the green is. The soil under the 11th green at Aronimink is older than the law that would have stopped it from being installed.
The grandfathering is the only mechanism that lets the PGA Championship be played on it this week. John Gosselin is maintaining a grandfather property. That’s what tournament preparation means on a push-up green built in 1928. If there’s a course in your area built before 1940, find out when its greens were last rebuilt from the subgrade.
That answer will tell you exactly what kind of soil chemistry the superintendent is maintaining. Subscribe to this channel. There are eight Aronimink videos this week. Sunday’s video covers the agronomic story behind why Aronimink went 33 years without a PGA Championship after 1962, and what it cost the course to get it back.
Now you know what they do before you tee off.