Ellis Maples: A Shining Star
Ellis Maples: A Shining Star Between Golf’s Golden Ages
Kyle Franz’s work in the Sandhills shines new light on one of the Southeast’s most influential — and underappreciated — golf architects
They were the bridge architects between the “Golden Age” names like Donald Ross, Alister MacKenzie and Seth Raynor and the modern era of Tom Fazio, Rees Jones and Jack Nicklaus.
Among designers creating noted golf courses from the 1950s through the ‘70s were Robert Trent Jones Sr. (Spyglass Hill, Firestone, Peachtree), Dick Wilson (Doral, Bay Hill, Cog Hill) and William and David Gordon (Saucon Valley, Stanwich).
Kyle Franz thinks Ellis Maples was the cream of the crop.
“All the press in the mid-1900s went to Dick Wilson and Robert Trent Jones, but in my mind, Ellis was the best architect operating during that period,” says Franz.
Franz first came to the Sandhills in 2010 to work on the construction crew for Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw on their restoration of Pinehurst No. 2. He soon met Kelly Miller, the CEO of the company that owned Pine Needles and Mid Pines at that time and later added Southern Pines Golf Club to its family. Franz coordinated restorations at each of those courses that were designed through the late 1920s by Donald Ross, the native of Scotland who moved to America in 1900 and soon began a prolific career in course architecture.
Ellis cut his teeth in the very early days of American golf architecture.
“I remember when Donald Ross and my dad changed the greens on Pinehurst No. 2 from sand to grass,” Ellis said. “They didn’t have a single blueprint. They did it all from their head.”
Frank and his brothers Angus and Walter spawned an impressive family tree of sons and grandchildren who have had considerable impact in the Carolinas golf world. Both of Frank’s sons, Ellis and Henson, would go into the golf business. Henson worked thirty years as golf superintendent at Pinehurst Country Club.
Ellis created more than 70 golf courses around the Southeast in the mid-1900s. Among Ellis’s most noted works during his mid-1900s design career were the Dogwood Course at the Country Club of North Carolina in Pinehurst (1963) and Grandfather Golf & Country Club in Linville (1968). Ellis passed the design torch to son Dan, who was helping build the courses as a teenager and has gone on to design courses from Pinehurst to Spain, from Germany to Japan. And a young Dan first played on a tractor when Ellis was building Whispering Pines in the late 1950s.
“Whispering Pines has great corridors,” says Kelly Miller, a partner in a new ownership group called Rolling Pines LLC that purchased Whispering Pines in 2025. “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.”
At Whispering Pines, Franz rebuilt all the greens and bunkers and adjusted some fairway widths and angles. The greens have been planted with Mini-Verde Bermuda, the same grass used on the parent company’s other three courses.
“If we did a blindfold test and took people out on our four courses here and did not tell them who designed them or any of the details, a bunch of people would say Whispering Pines is their favorite of the four,” Franz says. “Ellis’s work deserves more attention and credit.”
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.
