In 1896, Dorothy Campbell aged 13 years, joined the North Berwick Ladies Golf Club and with a handicap of nine was able to hold her own against the senior members. She was a pupil of Ben Sayers and learned to play the game over the West Links, at a time when an hour's lesson cost 3/6d and a day's golf on the links was a shilling.

In June 1905, Campbell entered the Ladies' British Amateur Championship at Cromer, where she reached the semi-finals. Two weeks later she entered the Scottish Ladies' Championship over her home course at North Berwick. The tournament was in its third year and had previously been held at St Andrews and Prestwick, but this was the first event to be organised by the Scottish Ladies' Golfing Association, formed the previous year.

Campbell was the first to win the British and U.S Amateur Championships back to back

The ladies arrived in North Berwick on Wednesday 13th June, when thirty-two played in a putting competition at the Royal Hotel, on ground now occupied by Craigleith View. On Saturday there was a stroke play tournament over the nine-hole Ladies Course and a competition on Monday over the West Links for prizes donated by the Town Council.

In 1905, Dorothy Campbell played for the British team that beat a U.S. squad led by the Curtis sisters, six matches to one.

The Championship started on Tuesday with 43 competitors, when the first and second rounds were completed in stormy conditions. In the semi-finals, Dorothy Campbell beat J. Rusack from Hilltarvit by one hole and faced Miss M. Graham from Nairn in the final. The game was all square after 18 holes and Campbell snatched victory on the nineteenth green to lift her first national title at the age of twenty-two.
Dorothy Campbell retained her Scottish title at Cruden Bay in 1906, won it again in 1908 and was runner-up in 1907 and 1909. The first time the British Ladies championship was played at St. Andrews in 1908, Dorothy Campbell played Maud Titterton in the final, and the entire town came out to watch, including Old Tom Morris. The final didn't start until three o'clock because the semi-final between Maud Titterton and the young Cecil Leitch went twenty-two holes. By that time the Old course was covered in fog.

Estimates for the crowd around the first hole was 9,000 people and by the 11th, a terrible storm blew in hitting the two contestants with hail, rain and wind. Many of the greens were completely covered in water. Titterton's ball bounded through the Swilcan burn on the final hole allowing her to square the match. At the first extra hole, Titterton beat Campbell with a par-4 to her bogey-5. On the 27th May, two days after the final Old Tom Morris died.

Campbell defeated Florence Hezlet in the 1909 British championship at Royal Birkdale Golf Club and took up an invitation to play in the American championship of that year at Merion Cricket Club, where she beat Nonna Barlow 3 and 2 in the final to become the first foreign-born U.S. champion and the first woman to hold both the British and U.S. Amateur titles. It was a feat that neither Glenna Collett nor Joyce Wethered who later dominated the game, accomplished.

The only tournament Campbell failed to win that year was the Scottish Amateur Championship played at Machrihanish when she was defeated in the final by E. Kyle. In 1910, Campbell moved to Hamilton, Ontario and won the first of her three in a row Canadian Amateur titles. She also defended her U.S. title in 1910 defeating Mrs. G. M. Martin at Homewood C.C. Flossmoor, Illinois. In 1911, she picked up her second Ladies' British Open Amateur Championship at Royal Portrush Golf Club, this time defeating Violet, the youngest of the three Hezlet sisters from Ireland.

Miss Campbell played with a shut club face, square to square and an unorthodox grip, with the thumb of the right hand under the shaft. Her best shot was a run-up shot that she used from distances of up to 50 feet. In the final of the North and South Championship, she beat her opponent by twice holing this shot from 40 yards out. She used her goose-neck mashie with a small face which she named "Thomas" for the shot, closing the club-face and hitting the ball on the downswing. At Augusta Country Club in 1926 she holed two chip shots and ended up having a record 19 putts for 18 holes lowering Walter Travis' record by two strokes for putts-in-one-round. She nicknamed her putter "Stella" which had been with her since 1909.

In 1913, Campbell married Jack V. Hurd of Pittsburgh and moved to the US. They had a son and Mrs. Hurd went into semi-retirement from the sport until the couple divorced in 1923. When she returned to tournament golf in the twenties, she recognised that her old sweeping style, with the club held in the palms and the wrists stiff, was obsolete. She took lessons from George Sayers, who she knew from North Berwick, then a professional in Philadelphia. He had her change to the Vardon grip and she began to compete again.
At forty-one she entered the 1924 U.S. Women's Amateur hosted by Rhode Island Country Club, home course to the tournament favourite Glenna Collett, but she unexpectedly lost in the semi-finals to Mary K. Browne of Los Angeles. In the final, Browne could easily outdrive Hurd on every hole, but "Stella" was on-fire. Mrs. Hurd beat Miss Browne 7 and 6 to win the title. This victory brought two more records that still stand; the number of years between titles, and the oldest player to win the event. Hurd continued to play through the 1930s winning the 1938 U.S. Senior Women's Championship at the age of 55.

She married Edward Howe in 1937 and divorced again in 1943. Two years later Dorothy Campbell Hurd Howe was killed at aged 61, when she was struck by a passing train while changing lines at Yemassee, South Carolina. She remains the finest amateur golfer ever to emerge from North Berwick. The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) was founded in 1950 and Dorothy Campbell Hurd Howe was elected to the Women's Golf Hall of Fame as a charter honouree at Augusta Country Club