Where the Maples Grew: A Pinehurst Golf Dynasty
By Lee Pace
For many years when Dan Maples ran his golf design business out of an office in the Village of Pinehurst, the suite of rooms provided a fascinating display of golf history and architecture — and a testament to the largesse of the Maples family.
Maples had the scorecard from Ellis’s 1930 round handy and delighted in pointing out the ace that Ellis made on the 215-yard fourth hole (which became the sixth hole in Donald Ross’s 1935 reconfiguration).
“A 215-yard hole 80 years ago was a pretty strong hole,” Maples said. “From as far back as I can remember, Daddy had a Spalding four-wood that absolutely cost a lot of people a lot of money over a lot of years. I suspect that’s what he hit.”
On a worktable at any given time might be computer generated drawings of the green complexes that Ellis built in the 1960s that Dan would come back years later and refurbish, turning them back to the original dimensions after years of “maintenance creep” and perhaps installing new drainage technology or advanced grass strains.
In the Tufts Archives in the Village of Pinehurst is a display case filled with Maples artifacts, including a photo of one of Frank’s teams of mules and drag pans scraping out an early 20th century golf course from the sandy soil around Pinehurst.
Nearly every appendage of the Maples family tree touches some form of the golf business — from design to maintenance, from administration to marketing. It’s been that way since Frank and brother Angus worked alongside Ross in the early 1900s in building four courses at Pinehurst Country Club and two more down Midland Road at Mid Pines and Pine Needles.
Angus was born in 1882 and helped construct Pine Needles in the late 1920s and later was course superintendent. Son Palmer was a lifetime golf pro — noted most in the Carolinas for the 28 years he spent at Benvenue CC in Rocky Mount — and Palmer’s three children, Palmer Jr., Nancy and Willie, grew up with the game as well.
Frank had two sons, Ellis and Henson. Ellis designed some 70 courses throughout the region, including the Dogwood Course at the Country Club of North Carolina, Whispering Pines CC and Woodlake in the Pinehurst area, and Grandfather Golf & Country Club in Linville. Henson was course superintendent at Pinehurst for 30 years. Both were instrumental in the development of bent grass in the South. Ellis was the first to plant bent on greens in North Carolina east of the mountains (at Pine Brook CC in Winston-Salem), but his interests were more in design than turfgrass research, so Henson took the baton and further developed the research in Pinehurst. Ellis’s two sons are Dan, the Pinehurst architect, and Joe, the head pro and superintendent for some four decades at Boone Golf Club, another Ellis creation. And Henson’s two sons are Gene and Wayne, both of whom have made a living in maintenance and turfgrass.
The courses at Whispering Pines are getting an overhaul in 2025-26 under a new ownership group.
“Whispering Pines has great corridors,” says Kelly Miller, a four-decade Southern Pines resident and managing partner of the ownership group for the golf and lodging properties at Pine Needles, Mid Pines and Southern Pines Golf Club and now Whispering Pines. “They have some great golf there. The routing is really good. I have always been intrigued in the lineage to Pine Needles and Mid Pines because Ellis as a young man worked on the construction of both those courses.”
Lee Pace is a freelance golf writer who has written about Sandhills area golf for four decades and is the author of club histories about Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Forest Creek.
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