The Story
Donald Ross laid Pine Needles across the North Carolina Sandhills in 1927, and the resort opened in January 1928 — a grand lodge and a golf course threaded through the longleaf pines just down the road from his masterpiece at Pinehurst. Within days of opening, the course held its first competition, the Women's Mid-South Open. It was a fitting start: no course in America would come to mean more to the women's game.
The property survived the Depression under a string of owners before its real story began in 1953, when the Cosgrove family — with PGA star Julius Boros and a young couple named Warren and Peggy Kirk Bell — bought the place. Peggy, a founding member of the LPGA Tour and a champion amateur, began teaching golf at Pine Needles in 1955 and never really stopped. Over six decades she taught thousands of golfers, made the lodge a family business, and became the most beloved figure in the Sandhills. In 2019, three years after her death at 95, she was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
The USGA repaid that devotion with championships. The U.S. Women's Open came in 1996 and Annika Sörenstam won going away; Karrie Webb routed the field in 2001; Cristie Kerr broke through in 2007. When the Open returned in 2022 — after Kyle Franz's restoration brought back Ross's rolling greens and the scrubby, sandy Sandhills look — Pine Needles became the first course in the country to host four U.S. Women's Opens. Helen Alfredsson's win at the 2019 U.S. Senior Women's Open only deepened the resume.
Pine Needles today is what it has always been: a family-run resort where the golf is serious and the welcome is not. You stay in the lodge, you walk Ross's fairways in the pine-scented air, and somewhere out there you feel Peggy Bell watching your grip.