Pinehurst Resort

History

The story of Pinehurst begins not with a golf course at all, but with a health resort. In 1895, Boston soda fountain magnate James Walker Tufts purchased roughly 5,000 acres of played-out farmland in the North Carolina Sandhills, intending to build a retreat where Northerners of modest means could escape harsh winters and breathe pine-scented air said to ease respiratory ailments. Golf arrived almost by accident, a diversion for idle guests, but it took hold so quickly that Tufts saw the game’s future woven into his own.

That future found its shape in 1900, when Tufts hired a young Scottish professional named Donald Ross, fresh from Dornoch, to oversee golf at the resort. Ross would spend the rest of his life there, and the sandy, rolling terrain of the Sandhills gave him a canvas unlike anything he’d worked on before — soil that drained well, native wiregrass, and long sightlines through longleaf pine. He built Pinehurst No. 2 gradually, refining it over decades rather than laying it out in a single stroke, with the course reaching a settled form only in the 1930s, not long before his death in 1948.

Pinehurst No. 2 has since carried the resort’s name into golf’s championship record: host to the Ryder Cup in 1951, the PGA Championship in 1936, and multiple U.S. Opens beginning in 1999, with Payne Stewart’s victory that year etched into the game’s memory. Renovation came in 2010–2011, when Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw stripped away decades of turf overgrowth and irrigation additions to restore the sandy, natural character Ross had originally intended, a restoration that helped return the U.S. Open there in 2014 for a historic men’s-women’s double. The resort itself grew around the course over the ensuing century, but No. 2 has remained its anchor and its legacy — Ross’s longest and most personal commission, tended and returned to across generations.