The Right Places

The North Carolina Pines: “Sand in Our Shoes”

If there are people in Kansas City, Central California, and West Virginia who are longing to get their places and their accomplishments on the map, there are others in other places who wish devoutly that the mapmaker would forget that they are there, where there is money that almost nobody knows about, which is just what those who have the money would prefer. “Please don’t come here,” these people say. “We have found what we want here, and there are enough of us already. We want what we have, and we want it to stay exactly as it is.” This is getting harder and harder to do.

For example, to the average Florida-bound motorist in winter, the stretch of U.S. Highway I that cuts across the center of North Carolina—past towns with such unprepossessing names as Gupton, Method, Vass, Stem, Mamers, and Wagram, and across rivers called, ridiculously, the Pee Dee and the Haw—is a journey merely to be endured. Woebegone farmhouses, none far from surrender to the wind, spatter the landscape, derelicts adrift in the grass. There is even a quality of thinness in the sunlight slanting against red earth that speaks eloquently of hard times. One longs for the softness of Spanish moss and palm trees that will be encountered farther south, and emerges from this countryside speaking piously of the poverty of North Carolina. It is hard for the uninitiated to believe that in the middle of all this, not far from the main north-south route, lie two tiny towns, Pinehurst and Southern Pines, with a combined permanent population of a little more than six thousand (swelling considerably during the winter season) that are devoted to the quiet and gentle pleasures of the rich.

Here, for a few square miles, the mood is unhurried and peaceful. These are the Carolina sandhills, softly rolling country with tall stands of loblolly and long-leaf pine creating deep, uncluttered vistas that seem to stretch for miles, free of undergrowth except for scattered patches of scrub oak. The sandy earth, in dappled sunlight, is blanketed with needles and fallen cones, and the air is heady with the odor of the pines and bright with the scarlet wings of cardinals. There is an abundance of bird life. Thousands of the North’s summer birds spend their winters here, and wild geese are protected on a huge preserve. Each tiny pond is dotted with ducks.

In the village of Pinehurst, narrow lanes without names twist in and around and back upon each other, in a plan calculated to befuddle the interloper, past all hedges and gates and drives that lead to large and sprawling houses shaded by magnolia and rhododendron, suffused with privacy. In early spring, the town’s most beautiful moment, gardens explode with daffodils and tulips, and the little streets are aflower with azaleas and dogwood. Camellias blossom in midwinter. Farther out, in more countrified Southern Pines, the zigzag split-rail fences extend along unpaved roads for miles, past pastures and stables of elegantly bred horses, private paddocks and show rings and jumping and racecourses. “Here, for status, you don’t build a swimming pool. You build a private racetrack,” says one Southern Pines woman. Through the pines, on an average winter morning, you can catch a glimpse of hunters in their pinks, riding to the hounds. Houses here are spaced far apart, across this open country.

Together, the two little towns would seem to compose a kind of island. “In the five months I spend here each winter, I don’t think I travel more than a radius of five miles,” says one woman. At the same time, an invisible but quite tangible frontier separates Pinehurst from Southern Pines. “Officially,” says another winter resident, “Southern Pines has nothing to do with Pinehurst, and Pinehurst has nothing to do with Southern Pines. At least that’s the theory. Of course, in actual practice it doesn’t work out that way, and there’s a certain amount of mixing back and forth. But not too much. In Southern Pines, we speak of being over here, and talk of Pinehurst as being over there. We talk of we, as opposed to they. We complain about having to go all the way to Pinehurst, and they grouse about coming all the way to Southern Pines.” The two towns are scarcely more than four miles apart.

Such disparity, furthermore, within what would seem to be an enclave of general privilege, has nothing to do with nuances of social position—not outwardly, at least. It is not a question of one town being better than another—not exactly. It is a difference based on the divergence of two athletic pastimes. Pinehurst is devoted to golf, and Southern Pines is dedicated to horses. It is ironic, perhaps, that right next door to each other should exist a capital of a sport—golf—that in the last fifty years has truly become a game for the masses, and the capital of another sport—fox-hunting—that hardly anybody understands, much less indulges in, any more.

But of course golf and horses beget two entirely different life styles. When a horse person speaks of “walking around hitting golf balls,” and a golfer speaks of “galloping around on horseback,” it is clear that the two will never see eye to eye on anything. They are much further apart here in the pines than Democrats and Republicans, even blacks and whites. The charm of horseflesh eludes Pinehurst competely, and Southern Pines considers golf a thoroughly frivolous preoccupation, even a middle-class one (even though, originally, golf was a game played by the aristocracy). Golf has become democratized; foxhunting has not, and is suffering for it as the older devotees pass on and leave few interested youngsters to replace them. Horse people do think of themselves as socially superior to golfers. When a golfer was declaiming enthusiastically about the delights of his sport to a horse person not long ago, the visitor listened patiently for a while and then said, “Well, perhaps—but golf isn’t exactly what you’d call a gentleman’s game.” And there is the nub of the matter. Horses are owned and bred and ridden and hunted and shown by ladies and gentlemen. Golf is something played by cloddish conventioneers who come each year to Pinehurst’s big, many-verandaed hotel, the Carolina.

Pinehurst takes its golf so seriously that in order to get so much as a starting time on one of the Pinehurst Country Club’s five courses one must actually live in Pinehurst. In Southern Pines, the horse is worshipped even after death. The garden of Miss Betty Dumaine, an ardent horsewoman, encompasses the massive grave of Grey Fox, a great hunter in his day, and his resting place is marked with a huge flat stone monument, engraved with his name, dates, and lineage, set in the grass and surrounded by a planting of shrubbery and flowers. The stone is as large as most terraces, and is frequently used as such—set up with tables and garden chairs—and is a popular gathering-place for cocktails when Miss Dumaine entertains. Many a solemn toast has been raised to the memory of her noble animal.

Southern Pines, furthermore, concentrates its affection on one sort of horse only: the hunter. “There are a few trotting people over in Pinehurst, but they never come here, you never see them,” says a Southern Pines man. As for racehorses, “Well, several people here have one or two—but we don’t concentrate on them. We don’t want to be like Lexington, Kentucky, which is the horse-racing capital. We don’t want to attract the sort of people that go with horse racing—jockeys, you know, and that sort of crowd.” At the same time, Southern Pines insists that it has “all the best hunters and show horses, the ones that will be shown at Madison Square Garden and all the best shows, all across the country.” The horsey heart of Southern Pines is the Moore County Hunt, founded a number of years ago by the late James Boyd, who loved horses and wrote period novels, including Drums (1925) and Marching On (1927). Boyd’s widow still lives in Southern Pines and, according to one resident, “still considers herself the grandest woman here.” After Mr. Boyd’s death, another man, Mr. W. Ozell Moss—and the Mosses are easily the grandest couple in Southern Pines—took over the Hunt and developed it until it has become by far the most exclusive club in the area, and one of the great hunts in the United States.

The Mosses themselves own the Hunt’s pack of hounds, considered the “best-mannered”—in hunting parlance—of any pack anywhere. Three mornings a week—Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday—during a season that extends from Thanksgiving to the end of March, the Moore County Hunt assembles, and fifty to a hundred hunters take off through the trees, across the fields, and over the fences of Southern Pines in pursuit of the fox.

Fox-hunting is heavily surrounded by rules and rituals. Earning your “hunt buttons,” or the right to wear pinks, is as difficult and as important as earning one’s “H” at Harvard used to be, back in the days when all such things were taken seriously. If not entitled to wear pink, one must wear black. An elaborate set of regulations determines which style of hat one must wear. Visitors from other hunts must wear their identifying colors, but otherwise one is not supposed to be “conspicuous” in dress. Southern Pines was highly critical, not long ago, when Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was photographed at a hunt in New Jersey wearing wrap-around sunglasses (not only bad form, but dangerous in case of a fall), without her hair tied back in a little net bag or snood (as good form dictates), and wearing entirely the wrong kind of hat—guilty on three counts of being a parvenue. The strict traditionalism of fox-hunting takes in such lofty dicta as (from a manual on the sport): “There is no class of person who gets the Hunt into disrepute more than grooms [italics the manual’s]. These, as a rule, are thoughtless and often leave gates open, causing damage by allowing livestock to wander. Strictest orders should be given to them by their masters, not once, but several times, during a season.” In other words, surviving in a tiny pocket of affluence in one of the poorest parts of the country is an anachronistic stronghold of the Edwardian age.

Fox-hunting is supposed to be all pour le sport, and obviously there is no wagering involved as there is in, say, golf. But there is a certain amount of competitiveness and, when the hounds “speak” and it’s off at top speed over the fields and fences, there’s more than a little jockeying for position—not to win, exactly, but to “ride up front” near Mr. Thomas Morton, the Master of the Field. Men and women who have been chatting cordially a few minutes earlier quickly become the bitterest antagonists, struggling for this position and this honor which carries a mysterious but distinct cachet. Less serious hunters—along with older people who are just out for a brisk morning’s ride—are content to ride behind at an easier pace until the fox, if he’s a gray one, runs up a tree, or, if he’s a red fox, “goes to earth,” or into a hole. Though there is supposed to be no shortage of foxes in Southern Pines, the fox population is discreetly “encouraged” by food left out for the vixens during the summer months.

The undulating sandhills of North Carolina are perfect for foxhunting because the soft, sandy soil is the perfect surface for horses’ feet. There are few holes, and no rocks, no steep climbs, no hazardous descents. The roads of Southern Pines are kept largely unpaved out of consideration for the horse population. This same sort of terrain is also perfect for golf courses, which helps explain why these two strange-bedfellow sports have collided here in North Carolina. The sandy soil was what Mr. James W. Tufts, a millionaire real estate man from Boston, first noticed when he came here in 1895. (Tufts was from the same Boston family that gave the land on which Tufts University now stands.) At that time, golf was a sport just beginning to be popular in America. It had been imported from Scotland; and, looking at the sandhills of Pinehurst (which were then known as the Barrens), Mr. Tufts envisioned a vast golf course, bigger than any that then existed in the world. From the Page family, local gentry—and Pages are still prominent in Pinehurst today—Mr. Tufts purchased some five thousand acres of land for a dollar an acre. Everybody thought he was crazy, and that the Pages had easily got the better of the deal.

“After he bought it,” his grandson recalls, “everybody told him it wasn’t worth but eighty-five cents an acre.” In any case, with his new land Mr. Tufts went to work building what amounted to a private town. It included hotels, a library, churches, stables, stores, a post office, greenhouses, garages, and the Pinehurst Country Club, which today has five eighteen-hole golf courses—each with a first tee right at the clubhouse—along with a driving range, putting greens, a lawn bowling green, and tennis courts.

“Ninety holes of golf!” Mr. Tufts was able to advertise to a nineteenth-century, golf-hungry nation. Ninety-one holes of golf became the local joke, with the Ninety-first Hole being the name of the clubhouse bar. Among the remarkable things about the remarkable Mr. Tufts and his enterprise was that he bought his land in June 1895 and was able to open his complete resort just six months later, in December. Builders today build slower, not faster, than they used to build. Also, for seventy-five years after its founding, the resort and the town remained firmly in the hands of Mr. Tufts’s direct heirs and members of the Tufts family. Then, to everyone’s distinct surprise, in 1970 the Tuftses sold their interests to something called the Diamondhead Corporation, which no one had ever heard of. There were mutterings about “Mafia connections.” But, in recent months, residents have adopted a live-and-let-live attitude about the new proprietors, and all continues as peacefully as before.

Because Mr. Tufts was from Boston, Pinehurst became, and has remained, a resort particularly popular with New Englanders. The Victorian clubhouse of the Pinehurst Country Club and the Carolina Hotel remain very New England in flavor, and much of the architecture in Pinehurst follows suit. Driving along Pinehurst’s shaded streets, one might easily be in a Massachusetts village. Modern houses are zoned out, though a few almost-modern ones have crept in behind the tall shrubbery. Even the name of the town has New England origins. While the village was taking shape, it was known locally as Tufftown, a name that did not strike Mr. Tufts as particularly appealing. He began casting about for another. The Tuftses had a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard, where a local real estate outfit was conducting a name-the-development contest. “Pinehurst” was one of the names submitted in Martha’s Vineyard, though it was not the name chosen, and Mr. Tufts liked it and took it for his town. It was prophetic. When Tufts first bought the land, heavy lumbering had bared the earth of all growth. But soon afterward the pines began to reappear. Now they are everywhere.

Today, those of the Tufts family who are still around think that “the charming sound” of the word Pinehurst had a lot to do with the town’s quick success. At first, Mr. Tufts had planned it as a resort for consumptives—who, before development of drug treatment of the disease, were big business for woodsy hotel-builders. But when, lured by the splendid golf, nonconsumptives began clamoring to play the Pinehurst courses, Mr. Tufts saw that he had a tiger by the tail. Soon the consumptives were being politely but firmly asked to leave, and today all deeds of houses sold in Pinehurst specify that no one with tuberculosis may buy a house. Pinehurst is one of the few places in the world where discrimination based on state-of-health is actively practiced.

Led by the Tufts enterprises and the enormous popularity of the game over the past half-century, Pinehurst became golfdom’s Mecca. Today you can get into a heated argument in Pinehurst over whether there are twelve or thirteen other golf courses in Pinehurst besides the Pinehurst Country Club. The fanciest new club is called the Country Club of North Carolina. Though there is disagreement about the architecture (it employs a good bit of glass), its eighteen holes of golf are generally less crowded and pleasanter to play than those of the Pinehurst.

Golf in Pinehurst has, in the meantime, created its own social systems. The elite of the golfing world here are members of something called the Tin Whistle Club, an organization that derives its name, supposedly, from the fact that, years ago, a tin whistle hung from a tree near the approach to the ninth hole on one of the golf courses. When this whistle was blown, drinks were served. The Club, with a membership of about two hundred men, and sprinkled with Boston Saltonstalls and Standard Oil Bedfords, is today devoted almost entirely to bibulous pleasures. Ladies are rigorously excluded from all functions, and for its headquarters the Club uses a pleasant book-lined room off the main lobby of the Pinehurst Country Club.

Even more exclusive, since there are only about forty members, is the Wolves Club, also all-male, devoted to after-golf bridge-playing. The Wolves got its name from an old Webster cartoon showing Mr. Caspar Milquetoast, “the Timid Soul,” cowering under the gaze of three vulpine creatures who are his partner and opponents at the bridge table. Bridge, at a quarter of a cent a point, is taken very seriously by the Wolves in their tiny clubhouse, which has room for only three bridge tables, a few chairs for passing kibitzers, and of course a bar. Liquor, though it is consumed with great enthusiasm, presents something of a problem in the Pines. Restaurants are allowed to sell nothing stronger than beer or wine, and customers are required to “brown bag” their harder liquor if they want to drink. Clubs serve liquor, but only from members’ own bottles. There is no bar in the Carolina Hotel, a fact which has brought dismay to the face of many an arriving conventioneer. State liquor stores will sell no more than five bottles to a customer at a time, but, as one resident points out, “You can go right back in and buy five more bottles as many times as you want.”

Perhaps the most unusual local club of all is the Dunes Club, which looks like a roadhouse from an old John Garfield movie and yet is, of all things, a quite fashionable and absolutely illegal gambling club. Right in the heart of the Baptist Bible Belt, where it’s hard to turn on your radio without hearing part of a sermon on sin, the Dunes’s green baize tables are active even on Sunday. Renowned for its food, the tables open up after the dinner hour. “Every now and then the Dunes gets raided, but the police always warn them ahead of time,” one man says. “Oh, and they make them close it down every so often, but it opens up again right away. The Dunes is a real institution here. We couldn’t get along without it.” And so a pattern of Pinehurst life involves golf in the morning, drinks and lunch with the Tin Whistle crowd at midday, on to the Wolves for a rubber or two of bridge, and then home to pick up the wife for a steak at the Dunes and some gambling.

There are some unkind souls who have had the poor taste to call both Southern Pines and Pinehurst “stuffy” and anachronistic in their struggle to remain unchanged in the face of a changing world. And it is true that with their New England roots there is a certain amount of upper-class Yankee reserve about the towns. Both are resolutely Republican, even though Mrs. Ernest Ives, the late Adlai Stevenson’s sister, is an enthusiastic resident—and an outspoken Democrat. One overhears some surprising things, such as, at a party recently, a woman saying, “When Eisenhower won the presidential election unanimously …” And a Boston-bred woman asking another of her ilk, “But how can you know anyone from Philadelphia well enough to stay with them?” Because of its proximity to Fort Bragg, Pinehurst can say, “We could make two baseball teams out of the retired generals who’ve moved here.” The late General George Marshall was a long-time resident. Retired generals, as a group, tend to be a conservative lot. Fort Bragg is a training center for airborne troops, and it is no surprise to look up on a sunny afternoon and see thousands of little men dropping from the sky in parachutes. Throughout the Vietnam war, the Pines have remained hawkish, unreconstructed.

A great deal of time, in both Pinehurst and Southern Pines, is still spent discussing social nuances. How, for instance, should one treat the Raymond Firestones’ head stable man, who goes to all the parties? Obviously, he is considerably above the ordinary stable-groom category, but where does one draw the line? The horsey Raymond Firestones, who have built a splendid house, are very much admired in Southern Pines. Not long ago, when the visiting lecturer at the Thursday night “Forum” at the country club—a cultural series—arrived without his white tie, the management politely whispered to Mr. Firestone, asking if he might have an outfit at home that the lecturer could borrow. It was the assumption that Mr. Firestone alone in Pinehurst might possess a white tie and trimmings, and to be sure Mr. Firestone did—several, in fact, for the visitor to pick from. That visiting lecturers in Pinehurst-Southern Pines are required to dress in white tie is an indication of the degree to which local residents are willing to go in order to maintain links with a more formal past.

A few months ago, at a Southern Pines party, a guest from out of town was tasteless enough to begin a long harangue with Mr. Firestone about what he considered to be the poor quality of Firestone tires. The next day, the hostess called Mr. Firestone to apologize for her guest’s behavior. Mr. Firestone murmured that it was quite all right, really, and then he added, almost timidly, “Is there anything else your friend would like to know about tires?”

Another glamorous figure in the area is Joe Bryan, a bachelor said to be “even richer than the Cannons”—the towel people—who has built a magnificent house-cum-stable on a high hilltop overlooking a man-made lake which he built “because I like to watch my horses drinking.”

Perhaps the most striking quality of the area is the restful slowness of Southern life. Everything seems to take extra long to do, and there are some people who do find this restful. Others, more accustomed to a brisker Northern snap and efficiency, find the slow pace highly irritating, and inveigh against the fact that it takes so long, in Pinehurst and Southern Pines, to get anything done. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue between a man from the North, wanting to buy a pocket comb, and a salesgirl, overheard at the Pinehurst Drug Store:

MAN: “Do you have any pocket combs?”

SALESGIRL: “We sure do!”

“May I have one please?”

“A pocket comb?”

“That’s right.”

“What color comb you-all want? A black one?”

“That’d be fine, yes.”

“Black? You-all sure?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Any special size?”

“Well, pocket size, I suppose—about so big.”

“About so big?”

Etc., etc.

This is, of course, the American South, and another settlement, West Southern Pines, is the black neighborhood which visitors are rarely taken to see. It is, needless to say, less resplendent than Pinehurst and Southern Pines proper, and white people are advised that it is unsafe to travel there at night. On the other hand, it is considered more respectable than the black ghetto of Fort Lauderdale. One is also told that an “unwritten rule” prevents blacks from walking on the streets of Pinehurst or Southern Pines after dark. But one woman asks, with a certain logic, “Why would anyone, black or white, want to walk there anyway? There’s no place to go, nothing to see, nothing to do.”

But those who live here would live nowhere else, while the arguments about Pinehurst versus Southern Pines go on and on. “They get very dressy and chi-chi over there, in Pinehurst,” one woman says, “but over here we’re much more informal. Nobody here cares what you wear—but you’d better not be seen sitting on a bad-looking horse. Also, we’re just enough off the beaten path so people let us alone. A lot of people don’t know we exist, which is just fine with us. We’re not easy to find, so we get lots of privacy. A reporter from Playboy came to do a story on this place. He fell off his horse, first thing! We were all delighted.”

And Mrs. Donald Parson, who has had a house in the area for many years and whose comfortable life has bridged both towns, says, “It doesn’t really matter which place you live in. It’s the feeling of the place that counts, the mood. It’s easy here, it’s relaxed. We don’t aspire to a Palm Beach, or a Camden. No one cares here if you have five cents or five million. We wander across each other’s lawns and gardens at cocktail time, and we’re always welcome wherever we end up. There’s no effort that goes into it, no striving or ambition in that sense. It’s known, you know, as ‘getting sand in your shoes’—that’s what happens when you fall in love with this place—sand in your shoes from these lovely old Carolina sandhills. We’ve all got sand in our shoes here. And once you get sand in your shoes, it never shakes out.”