Maples Roots Run Deep in Sandhills Golf Design
By Lee Pace
The men who have come to Pinehurst throughout more than a century to find golf holes amidst the sandy, rolling terrain have humored and nurtured the ground with infinite skill, passion and creativity.
Millions of years ago, the Atlantic Ocean covered what is now dry land along the East Coast. During the Miocene Epoch, the ocean receded and left a strip of what is now ancient coastline and beach deposits.
“The holes on a golf course have to be found, and the land in its natural state used to is best advantage. Nature can always beat the handiwork of man, and to achieve the best and most satisfactory results in laying out a golf course, you must humor nature.” WILLIE PARK JR.
Pinehurst’s first four courses were designed by Ross, who had been dead for a decade in the late-1950s when Pinehurst management wanted to expand its golf offering on the west side of Highway 5. Maples built 18 new holes and melded them with the existing No. 3 course to produce a second course, which would be christened Pinehurst No. 5 in 1961. Maples also designed the two courses at the Country Club of Whispering Pines.
Dan was a young boy playing on the building sites for some if his father’s projects, and later his own son, Brad, would earn a degree in landscape architecture from N.C. State University and join Dan’s company, Maples Design.
“Four generations of Maples and more than a hundred years — I think that’s pretty cool,” Dan says.
Chapel Hill based writer Lee Pace has written about golf in the Sandhills since the late 1980s and has authored a dozen books about clubs, courses and the people who’d made it special over more than a century.
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