The Birth Place of Golf in the U.S.

Many historians believed a golf club outside Yonkers, NY, was the first to import the sport from Scotland in 1886. However, Sea Pines founder Charles Fraser uncovered a ship’s manifest from 1786 noted that “golfer sticks” and “featheries”—a pre-20th century golf ball made from boiled bird feathers and cowhide—had been shipped to residents in South Carolina and Georgia. His findings indicated golf may have arrived at Harleston Green in Charleston a full hundred years before it was played in Yonkers. Charles Fraser honored that Scottish heritage by naming the PGA TOUR event the “Heritage Classic.”

History of Pinehurst

The history of Pinehurst begins with Bostonian James Walker Tufts, who bought 5,800 acres in the Sandhills of North Carolina so he could start a health resort. It is widely believed that golf was introduced to the area after Carolina Hotel guests were seen routinely hitting white balls at grazing livestock.

The summer he was brought to Pinehurst by founder James Walker Tufts, Donald Ross had no experience as a golf course architect. Originally, he was there to be the area’s first golf professional, but was soon commissioned by Tufts to design Pinehurst’s first four courses.

“My friends laughed at me,” Ross said in 1930. “They said it was folly to try to make a winter golf colony down in the jack pines and sand of Carolina.”

But in Pinehurst, Ross discovered land forms that harkened to his homeland; to wit, pure sand. “While golf had been played in a few places before Pinehurst was established, it was right here in these sandhills that the first great national movement in golf was started. Men came here, took a few golf lessons, bought a few clubs and went away determined to organize clubs.

Grand Strand History

These days, South Carolina’s Grand Strand stretches more than 50 miles from north to south, with some 90 golf courses that make this the Golfing Capital of America. The oldest existing course in Myrtle Beach, built in 1927 and having undergone a total restoration in 2009, is Pine Lakes Country Club; fittingly located almost in the exact center of the Strand. Once known as Pine Lakes International and affectionately called “The Granddaddy,” the course and its restored clubhouse are credited to Robert White, the first president of the PGA of America and a co-founder of the American Society of Golf Course Architects.