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.

On one wall hung a poster from 1950 announcing a golf exhibition at Raleigh Country Club with tour pros Sam Snead and Lloyd Mangrum facing club pros Ellis Maples and Orville White. That was when Ellis, the son of former Pinehurst green keeper and course construction chief Frank Maples, was plying his trade as an amalgam of pro, builder, superintendent and designer before focusing full-time on golf course architecture.

“Daddy was a super player, a super teacher,” Dan said. “He once shot a 62 at Raleigh Country Club. He shot a 68 on No. 2 in 1930 back when it played long, when you were hitting woods and long-irons into greens. That’s why his golf courses were so good. He brought such a great all-around foundation in the game to his work.”

Caption: Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club

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.

One day Dan held a sheet for the 15th green at Grandfather Golf & Country Club in Linville, one of Ellis’s most esteemed projects, and ran his finger along the original green perimeters. Then he noted another line for the green dimensions that had evolved over some two decades of weather, maintenance and golfer traffic. The original size was 5,648 square feet, the latter size 3,841 square feet.

“Imagine that,” he said. “That green shrunk by a third. All of them did. It happens everywhere. They were down to having five pin placements on that green. We took the greens back to where they were originally. Now that hole has 11 pin placements.”

Caption: Tufts Archives

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.

“Four generations of Maples and more than a hundred years — I think that’s pretty cool,” Dan says.

Dan’s great grandfather was James Maples Jr., who was born in 1856 in Moore County. Of his nine children, three of them — Frank, Walter and Angus — made at least some part of their living in golf-course construction and maintenance once James Tufts created Pinehurst in 1895, and that generation has spawned sons and grandchildren who’ve carried the golfing torch. The offspring of Frank and Angus, in particular, have been prolific in extending the Maples golf heritage.

Caption: CCNC Dogwood Course

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.

“My mother gave me a drawing I did when I was six or seven of a golf-course routing,” he says. “I was on a driving range in diapers. I drove a Jeep and staked out greens in fourth grade when Daddy was building Boone Golf Club. But with golf in the family and growing up in Pinehurst, that’s about what you’d expect.”

Today the Maples legacy remains alive with Dan’s design at Longleaf Golf & Family Club and Ellis’s work at the Country Club of North Carolina Dogwood Course, 36 holes at the Country Club of Whispering Pines and 18 at The Woods Golf Course in Whispering Pines. Ellis’s thumbprint is also evident at Pinehurst Resort, where in 1961 he took the 18 holes of Pinehurst No. 3 on the west side of Hwy. 5, built 18 new ones and cobbled them together with new No. 3 and No. 5 courses.

Caption: Longleaf Golf & Family Club

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.