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 |
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). |
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.’’
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