One of the prettiest drives in the Sandhills area of North Carolina might be along Midland Road as it wanders between Southern Pines in the east and the village of Pinehurst at the other end.  You’ll be traveling along the first four-lane road in North Carolina and the route of the trolley that, until 1906, went between Pinehurst and Southern Pines.

The tracks are long since gone and in their place are majestic pines and lush plantings.  And in less than a dozen miles you’ll pass an array of private homes, inns, restaurants, some businesses and—perhaps best of all if you are a golfer-very different-golf courses, some of them world class.  These are the type of courses that make the Pinehurst area synonymous with golf.  Starting in the east in Southern Pines, one passes Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club, Pine Needles Lodges and Golf Club, Knollwood Fairways, Talamore Golf Course, The Club at Longleaf, Midland Country Club, The Plantation Golf Club, The National Golf Club, ending at Pinehurst Country Club and its famous Pinehurst No. 2 course, site of the 1999, the 2005, and the 2014 US Open.

There are more than 40 golf courses in the Sandhills, which includes Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen and the surrounding countryside.  Besides attracting golfers from around the world, the courses have been home to many who have shaped the game of golf.  For instance, legendary golf course designer Donald Ross, whose skill made Pinehurst No. 2 internationally acclaimed, crafted other challenging courses in Pinehurst and Southern Pines.  These include Pinehurst No. 1, 3 and 4, Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Southern Pines Country Club. Peggy Kirk Bell, at Pine Needles, has been important to the development of women’s golf.  Bell and her family own and operate both Pine Needles and Mid Pines.

Peggy and her late husband, Warren “Bullet” Bell, married in 1953 and moved to the Sandhills to begin restoring the course that Donald Ross designed in 1927.  Pine Needles failed in the Depression and during World War II became a military training center and later a hospital.  It was the Bells who transformed Pine Needles into a combination resort and golf training center.

Peggy Kirk Bell in her book, The Gift of Golf, writes that “Entering the world of golf can be a daunting proposition for a lot of people, particularly women.”  And it was in 1959 after a woman visitor to the resort asked if someone could teach her to play golf that Bell offered her first school for women at Pine Needles.  She called the gathering a “Golfari,” a take-off, she said, on the word safari and a week-long excursion into golf.  Since then thousands of women have learned to play golf at Pine Needles; and the instruction has become so popular that now there is an annual family golf school held each summer.  Bell was instrumental in founding the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association and is recognized as one of the most influential women in golf.  She has received virtually every top golf award and was central in attracting the U.S. Women’s Open to her resort in 1996, and in having the national championship return there in 2007.

Many visitors come to the Sandhills area to play golf, enjoy its natural beauty, and experence relaxed Southern hospitality.   But it is perhaps in Pinehurst that the tradition and history of golf come alive.  And while many of the country’s top courses are members only, the links of the Pinehurst Country Club are available to everyone for a fee.

Don Padgett, the long-time director of golf operations at the Pinehurst resort once said, “Our friends in St. Andrews say that Pinehurst is the closest venue to what they represent.  Whether that be true or not we accept the compliment.”  Don Padgett—or Padge as he was known to friends and colleagues—came to Pinehurst in 1987 and for 15 years was in charge of the resort’s golf operations.  Padgett guided and transformed golf in Pinehurst and was instrumental in attracting the 1999 U.S. Open.  He retired in 2002, becoming director of golf emeritus and died in May 2003.  But the Padgett tradition will continue in Pinehurst with the appointment of Don Padgett II as President of Pinehurst, Inc.

While the Pinehurst resort includes eight courses, the senior Padgett noted that when people asked about Pinehurst what they really were asking about was the resort’s crown jewel, Pinehurst No. 2.  Padgett continually reminded employees and management alike that the Ross-designed course No. 2 was a piece of American history and a national treasure and that if it faired well, so too would the resort and village of Pinehurst.

Pinehurst, in the estimation of noted golf writer Herbert Warren Wind, represented continuity in the early development of golf in America.  The tradition began in 1895 when J. W. Tufts first built Pinehurst and then a few years later began a grand experiment when he installed the resort’s first nine hole-course.  It continued with Donald Ross, who until his death in 1948, designed and developed approximately 400 courses in Pinehurst and around the country.  “The game of golf in Pinehurst,” Wind observed, “was nurtured in a fashion that occurred nowhere else in America in that critical formative period in the history of the sport.”