Question: What Sandhills resort started as a health retreat?
Answer: Pinehurst Resort, located in the Sandhills region of North Carolina, is best known today for its championship golf courses and even boasts the nickname “the cradle of American golf,” but according to the resort’s history, it was originally intended to be a health retreat.
Boston Philanthropist James Walker Tufts purchased Pinehurst’s 5,800 acres in 1895 to create a place for middle-class Americans to recuperate from the ailments of the time, particularly those suffering from respiratory illnesses caused by the Industrial Revolution. Many people believed the region’s “pine ozone” offered a cure for those ailments.
Bonus info: Tuft’s plan was to create a New England-style village with walkways and year-round greenery. Riding, hunting, polo, lawn bowling, bicycling, and archery were popular in the resort’s early days and remain so today. A few years later, some hotel guests introduced golf by hitting little white balls into the dairy cattle grazing fields that disturbed the herd. Tufts then hired Dr. D. Leroy Culver of New York to design and build a rudimentary nine-hole course, which was completed in 1898.
