Pinehurst & the Sandhills

In 1895, a Boston soda fountain magnate named James Walker Tufts bought 5,000 acres of depleted timberland in the North Carolina Sandhills for roughly a dollar an acre. He hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design a village. He hired Donald Ross to build a golf course. The village became Pinehurst. The golf course became No. 2. And the depleted timberland became, over the next 130 years, the most concentrated collection of consequential golf in America. That history matters because it...