Pinehurst - It Takes a Village
“As we came into the Village I can remember feeling that I had been granted some sort of special exemption. Both of my parents said they felt like they had left the whole world behind. It could be very easy to have an intensely negative response to this feeling and the Village that evokes it. Because what, after all, is being left behind? Pinehurst has been designed and managed to keep crass commercialism and ethnic conflict out and a sort of mindless bliss in. Condemning the Village on this basis is too facile. To do so misses the fact that places like Pinehurst - however nostalgic - are in their own way a critique of modern times in America. We might also listen to that critique.” - Richard J. Moss in Eden in the Pines: A History of Pinehurst Village
“It’s a beautiful day in Pinehurst”, “Find rest and relaxation among whispering pines”, and “We’re glad you have decided to come and experience the restorative elements of the sand” were playing on a loop as I was left on hold with the reservations agent. My phone was on speaker, and just by the tone of the overly-dramatic voice, my brother Jack’s and my eyes involuntarily rolled into the back of our skulls. We didn’t need to be schmoozed or convinced by anyone to go to Pinehurst. It had been on the tip of our tongues whenever the conversation of the next golf trip came up around our firepit. Heck, I was calling to make reservations - no need to sell me past the close. “It’s golf, not rehab”, Jack chimed back in response to the soothing voice that sounded as though we were sitting in a spa waiting room.
We had set up a computer and a notepad in the only place that had WiFi and cell reception. It turns out that normal guests of our Maui vacation resort don’t need to plan other trips while they’re in the middle of one. But we weren’t just planning any trip. We were planning a boys golf trip. Sounds the same, but drastically different in approach. The process of planning one of these trips is truly an art form. Tee times and lodging need to have pinpoint accuracy. Dinner reservations, transportation, and even drinks at the 19th hole can be envisioned and scheduled. We weren’t looking at our time there to be restful. That’s why we were in Maui: to rest. Our goal at Pinehurst was to play as much jaw-dropping golf as possible in the span of a week, not lackadaisically partaking in the “restorative elements of the sand” or smelling pine trees. It sounded too new age anyway.
James Walker Tufts grew up in a family where it was said that one’s mission when it came to money was to give it back. Using generational wealth for the betterment of others was not the usual story in the late 19th century. But Tufts had a different kind of story.
He was prone to fainting and stomach issues as a child, and there was only so much money that could be thrown at his ailment without hitting the ceiling of the era’s medical diagnoses. Being from the greater Boston area, there is one element that ties into this grander Pinehurst story. It was becoming common thought that New England was an unhealthy environment to live in, especially in the winter months. Whether that sounds like pre-Enlightenment thinking or has some true medical efficacy, it was true in that age if you were a Bostonian.
Even with medical setbacks, Tufts made the most of an idea he had about soda fountains; stores that served food and drink as well as sometimes acting as pharmacies. Anything from ice cream to Coca-Cola with actual cocaine in it were sold in these establishments. What rocketed his investment forward throughout the country was that these stores most often sold soda from an apparatus Tufts patented in 1883 named the Arctic Soda Apparatus. He sold his interest in the American Soda Fountain Company in 1891 and immediately started looking for a way to build his passion project: a healing center open for everyone to experience. The location for such an endeavor had him looking all over the country, and a man by the name of John T. Patrick had the answer.
Patrick was elected the Commissioner of Immigration for the state of North Carolina in a day and age where no one wanted to drive through Moore County, let alone settle down there. This was the post-civil war south. The economic reconstruction was still very much the country’s focus. Not everything there was destroyed, but pretty close to it. General Ulysses S. Grant’s strategy of “unconditional surrender” when the Union Armies came through in the mid-1860s resulted in the razing of entire cities and even sowing fields with salt, like ancient Roman legions a thousand years before them. Come the 1890s, southerners, and apparently northerners as well, were looking to start over.
The question of how to entice people into buying seemingly useless and infertile land was answered through a miraculous testimony. Patrick had heard rumblings of the sick being healed from strange ailments only through spending time there, but he never believed the rumors until a northern doctor came to Moore County to regain his health. How could he believe them? It sounded, and sometimes still does personally, ludicrous to say that concoction of humidity, warmer weather, and pine scent could work wonders never seen before.
Patrick spoke with him when his recovery was almost completed, and in doing so, found a perfect vehicle to encourage people to come and live in North Carolina and Moore County specifically. Even that physician was shocked by his timely recovery, astounded even with a recovery at all, and started to introduce the idea of medical retreats to doctors and their patients in New England. A milestone in Patrick’s campaign strategy was when the New Hampshire Index wrote, “...in our opinion, this section will soon eclipse Florida as a health and winter resort.” The news had gotten out.
But Partrick wasn’t the only convert. In 1885, Tufts himself heard of a story about a Reverend Benjamin Goodridge, whose wife was suffering from life threatening pneumonia. They decided to move down to Southern Pines, another town located in Moore County and just down the road from the modern day village of Pinehurst, in a last ditch effort for recovery. She fully recovered in a remarkably short amount of time. Medical professionals believed it to be a miracle.
The piece of land now occupied by The Cradle, the par three course at Pinehurst Resort created by Gil Hanse in 2017, was nothing but an open, sandy waste prior to 1898. Harness racing and other equestrian centered activities were activities more popular than anything else in the village. But when Dr. Leroy Carver noticed some guests playing a mysterious game involving hitting a ball with a stick on that very piece of open, sandy waste, his imagination started to race. He had faintly heard about this new sport, as it was still slowly making its way over from Scotland and Ireland at that time, but it was getting more popular by the month. So Dr. Carver laid out the first nine holes for the resort that year, and whether or not he realized it at the time, made Pinehurst a true launching pad for the popularization of golf in America. “The Cradle of American Golf” was born and was awaiting someone to take it to the next level.
Donald Ross was born in 1872 in Dornoch, Scotland, just a mere walk away from one of the greatest links courses in the world, Royal Dornoch, a course at which he later became the head professional. That position pulled a different kind of gravitas back then, with many more responsibilities than just instruction and managing the tee sheet. Being responsible for the village’s links was no small endeavor, and the citizens of said village didn’t entrust it to just anyone who could swing a club. Ross had become a more than sufficient club maker and had learned a multitude about maintenance and course design, traveling all over the British Isles and even learning from the legendary Old Tom Morris himself .
A man from Watertown, Massachusetts was looking for a new professional for his club, the Oakley Country Club. As Richard Moss describes, Ross was offered $460 a month and 50 cents every lesson taught; payment that seemed like it was from a different planet in contrast to wages back in Scotland. And in a matter of weeks, Ross was sailing to the new world.
After redesigning the original course at Oakley, Ross was recommended to Tufts by some members with “long good standing” at the club. Labeled as a renaissance man, Ross was exactly who Tufts needed to get the Pinehurst “golf program” up and running. Why hire a club maker, an instructor, and a designer when you can hire one man who is able to do them all?
So after a dinner at the Tufts Mansion in Medford, a monied suburb of Boston, Ross would join the Pinehurst staff; and just like everyone else, migrate to and from New England with the goal of making northerners feel a sense of belonging in a place that had nothing to offer them but humid air, pine trees, and gravel mines.
That is an important piece of the puzzle when discussing the genesis of one of the world’s greatest golf meccas: the feeling of nostalgia. It doesn’t give this feeling the second or third time you walk around the village. Nostalgia creeps up on you the very first time. But how is that possible?
It was more than possible for northerners to feel this way, especially when that was Tufts’ very intention. He wanted to recreate New England style villages in the south. If it was possible for Tufts to have picked up Old York, Maine, a classically quaint New England town, and dropped it in North Carolina, he would have. Even the Carolina Hotel, the resort’s main accommodation, can be described as a mix between the Hotel Fairmount in Old York, and the Lido Hotel on Long Island.
An agriculturally based, slow and easy lifestyle away from the bustling, industrially deafening environment of the cities was becoming a very popular idea in New England. Tufts had, in theory, tapped into a community’s desire for a place that oozed physical and mental restoration. The original intent for Pinehurst was not to become a golfing destination, but a retreat. That’s what guests feel even to this day.
When you walk through the village of Pinehurst, you don't feel like you’re in the south, and that’s on purpose. There is brick everywhere, a site that those who were born and raised in Boston and most other parts of New England were very familiar with. There are Irish pubs with quills and four leafed clovers hanging from their signposts, gas powered street lamps, and many other intricacies that made northerners feel not like they were trying to adapt to a new environment, but that they already belonged.
The word “vibe” is overused a lot. But it’s really the only appropriate word to sum up Pinehurst. It has its own ecosystem; an ecosystem that apparently has scientifically proven healing capabilities. An ecosystem that would crush all my assumptions, and shock my senses the only way the Carolina’s know how to: with class.