Rebirth at Woodlake
By Lee Pace
A.B. Hardee was going to bring the ocean to the Sandhills.
He was going to build a lake and a dam and install a wave-making machine on some swampy property in northeast Moore County. You could ride the waves on the lake, then play an Ellis Maples golf course around the lake.
“It’s laid back, we’ll have more fun in two weeks than some places have in two years,” longtime club professional and Woodlake resident Stuart Taylor liked to say.
That idyllic life at Woodlake for some 2,000 residents was rocked beginning in 2016 when torrential rainfall from Hurricane Matthew knocked off a series of dominoes that included a breach of the dam, the lake being drained by the State of North Carolina for flood control purposes, the golf courses closing and the German ownership group losing the facility to bankruptcy.
The first move in the fall of 2021 was to hire golf architect Kris Spence to take a look at the overgrown Maples golf course that opened in 1971 and provide a resurrection plan (the 1996 Palmer course will remain closed). Spence remembers driving the property with Cara Spencer, one of Allison’s daughters.
“Nature had totally reclaimed it except for a few areas where it looked like homeowners had been cutting some grass,” Spence says. “Cara asked what I thought it would take to get it back open. Hell, I couldn’t even see it. The fairways were 6 feet tall and there were trees in the bunkers.”
Spence hired subcontractors in the fall of 2021 to start clearing the Woodlake corridors and spent considerable time himself on a bushhog machine around the green complexes.
“The more I looked at the golf course, the more I realized this is some really good work by Ellis Maples,” Spence says. “We got the greens cleaned up, and I started to study them. I got excited. After a month, I went back to Cara and said, ‘I don’t think you know what you have here. You have one of the best golf courses in North Carolina.’ That’s saying a lot, especially for this region.”
The first four holes wrap around the lake and then venture into typical Sandhills ground with sandy soil and gently undulating slopes, and the course does not return to the clubhouse after nine, always a good sign that the architect was allowed to find the best 18 holes without the restraint of bringing the ninth hole back to the start.
Spence built a few new tees to add some length and adjusted some fairway bunker placements to catch the longer drives of today versus the 1971 club and ball standards. Many of the bunker complexes are dotted with the wiregrass so indigenous to the Sandhills along with acres of hardpan sand. The greens were sprigged with Tif-Eagle Bermuda.
Spence compares the view across the lake to something you might see in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and has been heartened with the opinions from a handful of visitors with high golf I.Q.s who have toured the course since it reopened.
“It’s been fun to watch people’s reaction to it,” he says. “They are like, ‘Wow, I hadn’t expected that.’ This is one terrific golf course. I don’t fall in love with golf courses per se, but I really admire this and appreciate what Ellis did 50 years ago. It was amazing that a golf course of this quality had escaped attention and recognition for so long. It was very satisfying to play a role, to put it back in its rightful place.”
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.