The Story
In 1921, the Tufts family of Pinehurst — the people who had already built America's home of golf a few miles up the road — backed a new development called Knollwood in the pines outside Southern Pines. They hired New York architect Aymar Embury II to design a stately Georgian inn, and Donald Ross to lay a golf course through the rolling, sandy valley below it. Ross's eighteen opened that same year, folding in and out of the valley floor and up its ridgelines so naturally that almost nothing about the routing has ever needed to change.
That is the remarkable thing about Mid Pines: it still is what Ross built. While much of American golf spent the twentieth century remodeling itself, the routing here has remained essentially intact since 1921 — one of the purest surviving expressions of Ross's work anywhere. In 1994 the course came into the family of Peggy Kirk Bell, the founding LPGA member and legendary teacher whose Pine Needles resort sits directly across Midland Road, uniting the two Ross sister courses under one devoted roof.
In 2013, a young architect named Kyle Franz — a veteran of the Coore-Crenshaw and Doak crews — was given his first solo restoration here. Working from a 1939 aerial photograph, he stripped away decades of encroaching turf and trees, restored the sandy wiregrass scrub Ross knew, and recaptured the original scale of the greens and fairways. The work drew national acclaim and helped ignite the broader restoration renaissance across the Sandhills.
Golfers come to Mid Pines now for something increasingly rare: a great course you walk from the front door of a 1921 inn, play in under four hours on canted, sandy ground, and finish beneath the hotel windows — then do it all again tomorrow. It is the Sandhills at their warmest and most authentic.