NOTE: This was written in advance of the 1999 U.S. Open, the first held in the village of Pinehurst, and published in the Greensboro News & Record. While much has changed in the 25 years since, it is still the most sizzling place in the Sandhills. If you enjoy
reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research
expenses for stories such as this one, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep
posts like this free of ads.© Landmark Communications, 1999
BY TIM PEELER, Greensboro News & Record
PINEHURST -- Listen closely during a rainstorm, they used to say, for the sizzle. It was the
sound of water going straight through the sand and striking the fires of hell.
They used to say that anyone buried here needed a large dose
of fertilizer thrown over the grave even to have a chance of rising from the
dead come Judgment Day.
They used to laugh and laugh when they thought about how
Walter Hines Page of Aberdeen hoo-dooed that sickly Yankee, James Walker Tufts,
into buying 5,000 acres of sapped-out, clear-cut pine barrens for about $1.25
an acre in 1895, where the soda fountain maker from Boston planned to build a ``health
resort,’’ similar to the one built eight years before in nearby Southern Pines.
Now, there’s knee-slapper, even for famed writer and Watauga Club member Page, who was certain that Tufts would disappear into barrens like the red-cockaded woodpecker.
“He gave me his check for $500 to bind the bargain, but I am
afraid that I will never see him once he gets home and thinks it over,” Page
wrote in a letter to a friend.
So how did this remote little outpost in the hellish
environs of Moore County become golf’s heaven on Earth, a New England village
with a distinctly Southern drawl?
It started with Tufts’ vision: an easily accessible
community that catered to retired school teachers, military personnel and
clergy, offering the restorative powers of sand and pine sap. He went straight
back to Massachusetts, where he hand-delivered a low-ball offer to an old
acquaintance, world-renown landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, asking
him to lay out something distinctive on his scruffy new property.
The village’s first building was a hotel, the Holly Inn. The
second order of business was to lay out dairy land and build a barn, which
proved to be a fortuitous choice.
By 1897, Olmstead – who won lasting fame for his design of
Central Park in Manhattan and the grounds of George Vanderbilt’s the Biltmore
House in Asheville – had brought in some 225,000 pine seedlings, trees and
shrubs that began the transition from wasteland to wonderland.
In two years, Tufts’ legion of workmen, engineers and
planners had built the inn and 38 cottages, the Department Store and the
Casino. Rooms, which started at $3 a night, were filling up fast. But there was
little to do in the village, except soak up the mild winter climate and kill
time.
Visitors eventually took to hitting golf balls in the
pastures, which caused a local farmer to complain that the tourists were
disturbing his cows. It wasn’t long before golf was the passion of the village.
Neither Tufts nor his son Leonard were golfers, but they bet the village’s
future on this ancient Scottish game, scrapping plans to plant a peach orchard
and installing a crude nine-hole golf course instead.
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Donald Ross
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Even after Donald Ross arrived in 1901 and began his redesign of the
course into an 18-hole layout, golf was an iffy proposition. Little grass grew
in the sand, and serious consideration was given to pulling up what little sod
was there and making the entire course nothing but sand. The resort went so far
as to buy a steamroller to regularly roll the fairways flat.
Richard Tufts, grandson of Pinehurst’s founder and a
well-decorated golf enthusiast, grew up playing golf with a black ball, which
he could find more easily on the white sand of the golf course.
The village thrived, attracting a wealthier clientele.
Sometime before 1899, a five-foot fence was erected around the 100-acre village
to keep out the wild razorback hogs that were disturbing Olmstead’s handiwork.
Some cynics say the village has been trying to keep the pigs out ever since.
Pinehurst celebrated the arrival of the 20th century with
the grand opening of the Carolina Hotel, which was dedicated on Jan. 1, 1900, and
remains the resort’s centerpiece for lodging. The village, meanwhile, matured
and was noted for its quietness and quaintness. A law once was passed
prohibiting any resident from owning a rooster, lest it crow in the morning and
disturb the out-of-town guests.
It’s said that you could overlay a transparency of today’s
village on a picture of the town during those golden years and the only thing
that would be different is the make of the cars. The Theater still stands
proudly, home to shops and a restaurant. The Casino serves as the offices for
Pinehurst Properties. And the Holly Inn, which fell into disrepair when it was
abandoned in the 1970s, recently went through a $10 million renovation and is
open for business again.
One thing that certainly hasn’t changed is the tiny town’s
love of golf. It has soaked into every building, every crack in the sidewalk
and is passed into every soul that walks the streets.
“There isn’t any ambivalence that golf is the centerpiece of
Pinehurst,” said Tom Stewart, a former 30-year golf pro who owns a golf shop in
the village. “If you go into any restaurants, people are talking about it. You
see people driving their golf carts down the main road. People are always
practicing their swing in their back yards.”
That spirit brewed for many years, as celebrities,
Presidents, adventurers and golf lovers filed through the America’s “Winter
Home of Golf.”
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Amelia Earhart (Tufts Library).
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Annie Oakley lived here, and Amelia Earhardt passed through.
John Philip Sousa vacationed here, and Warren G. Harding did too, leading a
flood of presidents that included William Taft, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry
Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald Ford. Bing Crosby came, not for the
golf that he loved so much, but to go riding and hunting.
Gen. George C. Marshall bivouacked here after he retired
from the military. The list is impressive and endlessly boring.
Maureen Orcutt, an accomplished amateur from New York who
happened to be a sportswriter for The New
York Times, remembers the golden years of Pinehurst, when she and Glenna
Collett, Virginia Van Wie and Helen Hicks were the talk of the village. Those
were the days of Walter Hagen, Tommy Armour, Horton Smith and Henry Picard.
Bobby Jones used to visit after he retired from competitive golf.
“It was a fun time to
play golf at Pinehurst,” said the 92-year-old Orcutt, who has lived in Durham
for three decades. “Not much has changed, really, in the village. It is such a
lovely place.”
Pinehurst is credited as the place where America’s love
affair with golf began. It’s also the home of the nation’s first driving range
and miniature golf course.
Over the years, the village and resort have thrived on more
than just golf. Pinehurst is still the best place in the state to put on a pair
of white pants, a starched white shirt and a pair of tennis shoes for an
afternoon of lawn bowling. Defy any expert to name a better place to play
croquet.
Equestrian training is still popular, especially in Southern
Pines, the adjacent town with a penchant for hosting writers. The gun club, where Oakley once served as the resident pro, was grassed
over a few years ago by designer Tom Fazio, who built resort's Centennial No. 8 golf
course on top of it.
Rod Innes, 87, remembers Pinehurst’s glory days, too. As an
apprentice to Ross, Innes watched the thriving little village become a magnet
for moneyed Northerners looking for a place to relax and get away from harsh winters.
“These were people who were used to dressing up for dinner,”
Innes said. “They brought their servants with them. When the movie house opened
three nights a week, there would be people dressed in tuxedos and evening
dresses.
“It was quiet a lovely sight.”
Alas, as Innes tells it, that crowd died out and their
descendants were more attracted to ocean resorts in Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head and Florida’s vast coastline. Golfers still showed up, but by
the time the resort was sold in 1970 to Diamondhead Corp., Pinehurst was no
longer at the top of the list for wealthy patrons.
“A new breed of cats came in after the resort was sold,”
Innes said. “It became a real-estate venture. The place changed.”
In 1984, the resort was taken over by a consortium of
northern banks and eventually sold to Robert Dedman’s Dallas-based Club
Corporation of America, which set about restoring the reputation the resort
enjoyed during the golden years.
It’s hasn’t always been easy. The retirees in town, the
biggest part of the village’s 8,300 population base, don’t always get along
with CCA. But the company has spent some $90 million during its 15-year ownership
to bring the resort – and the community – back to life, not unlike what James
Walker Tufts did to the Pine Barrens more than 100 years ago.
“It’s been a huge investment of money and time,” said
Pinehurst CEO Patrick Corso.
Bringing the U.S. Open to Pinehurst and re-opening the Holly
Inn, the village’s first construction project, is the culmination of that
restoration.
“They have done a
bang-up job of putting Pinehurst back to where it used to be,” Innes said. “I
can’t say enough about that.”
The village, which became the first golf-based community to
be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, will no doubt be
receiving plenty of publicity during the course of the Open, which may spur
more people to choose to live here.
They will find a close-knit community, one that is resistant
to too many outside recommendations and steadfastly against too much intrusion
by common modern growth.
“There is a respect for what the history is here and what
the traditions are here,” said Stewart, who moved up from Southern Florida
nearly three years ago. “There aren’t many places like this left, so everybody
is conscious of trying to protect it. We know it’s going to grow.
"But this
little oasis that is Pinehurst, I think will be preserved for another 100
years.’’