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.

He would call it Lake Surf. Tourists and homebuyers would come from all over.

Sadly, for Hardee, the early 1970s was hardly the era to initiate a business enterprise in the resort or residential domains. Soaring interest rates. Long lines to buy gasoline. Washington mired in Watergate. A president and vice president are fired.

The concept eventually worked under a different name and new owners. Woodlake Country Club just outside of Vass certainly distinguished itself from its Sandhill competitors with a 1,200-acre lake with 13 miles of shoreline; 36 holes of golf designed by Maples and Arnold Palmer; recreational amenities from swimming to golf, fishing to jet-skis. One Fourth of July, The Embers blared out I Love Beach Music and other summertime shagging favorites.

“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.

Five years later, the community and club got a new lease on life when Atlantic National Capital bought the community at auction for $3.5 million and began negotiations with the county and state lawmakers to repair the dam. The new owners are headed by Fayetteville businessman Keith Allison and his three daughters. As Allison was growing his Systel Business Equipment company into a significant independent dealer of official equipment in the Southeast in the 1980s and ‘90s, the family enjoyed their weekend retreat to their home in Woodlake.

My daughters learned to ski at Woodlake,” Allison says. “My family and I have a long-standing association and sentimental attachment to Woodlake.”

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 knew from the outset that if the course was designed by Ellis Maples, there were likely some good bones underneath the jungle. Maples grew up in golf design and maintenance, his father, Frank, serving as the longtime Pinehurst superintendent under Donald Ross. Ellis started working in golf construction and maintenance at the age of 14. In 1948, he supervised the construction of Ross’s final design project, Raleigh Country Club, and worked for five years as the course superintendent. Maples then when into private practice in 1953 as a golf course architect.

His most notable works include the Dogwood Course with Willard Byrd at the Country Club of North Carolina (1963) and Grandfather Golf & Country Club in Linville (1968). Spence was intimately familiar with the Dogwood Course, have handled a renovation of that course in 2015-16.

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.

The course reopened in September 2023 and will mark a complete renaissance when the dam and lake work are completed later in 2024, and the lake is hopefully restored by the end of the year. The golf shop has been renovated, a new restaurant opens later this spring and the course is open to outside play.

“Hole after hole you could pick as a signature hole,” says Woodlake General Manager Jeff Crabbe, a veteran of the area golf community and former staff professional at Pinehurst Resort. “There’s not a bad hole on the golf course. Once the lake comes back, it’s going to be pretty special. The vision of the ownership is to make this one of the most sought-after communities in the area and the state. We started from zero in a new membership program and are at 115. We’re proud of that growth.”

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.

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