Golftown Journal

Flashback to 1959: The baby boomers are entering adolescence. The Korean War is finished, Vietnam yet to come. Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th states. Frank Sinatra wins his first Grammy Award for best album with Come Dance With Me. Art Wall wins the Masters and Billy Casper the U.S. Open. Closer to home, a long-hitting teenager with a blond crew cut wins the North and South Amateur on Pinehurst No. 2 — Jack Nicklaus would turn pro the following year.

And it had been more than 30 years since a new golf course opened in the Sandhills.

A.B. Hardee changed all that when he opened a sparkling new residential, golf and country club community around a series of lakes just northeast of Pinehurst. He hired Ellis Maples, son of the former Pinehurst greenkeeper Frank Maples, to design the golf course, and called it the Country Club of Whispering Pines.

“Whispering Pines was one of the most renowned courses in its time,” said Woody Davis, whose Pinehurst-based golf management company owned the facility in the early 2000s. “It’s nearly 50 years old, and there’s a lot of history here. But a lot of people don’t know we’re here. It’s a true jewel. It’s a hidden secret.”

Kelly Miller had just moved to Southern Pines in the mid-1980s after marrying Peggy Ann Bell and going to work in management at the Bell family’s Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club (and later the family would acquire Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club and Southern Pines Golf Club). Whispering Pines was one course on a rota of venues that a group of up to 16 golfers would play regularly, the group including Warren “Bullet” Bell and noted area club pros like Harvie Ward and Andy Page.

“I have fond memories of Whispering Pines,” Miller says. “It has great corridors. 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.”

Hardee, a developer from Lexington, N.C., was intrigued in the mid-1950s with the lake-studded area between roads that are now U.S. 15-501 leading to Pinehurst and U.S. 1 going to Southern Pines. The cornerstone to this section was Thagards Pond, which at some 6 miles in circumference was more of a lake than pond.

Hardee envisioned a community of lakeside homes, water sports and picnic facilities along with a golf and country club. It would be a self-contained town, complete with sewer, fire and police. His construction crews worked around an ancient cemetery, and he lowered the lake 6 feet to remove stumps and logs as a safety measure for boaters. The lake was stocked with nearly 20,000 warm-weather trout. Playing on the area’s beacon as a golf resort, Hardee built three buildings of villas for out-of-town guests. The club opened for golfers in 1959.

“It’s a perfect haven for retiring people, within easy driving distance of resort centers in Southern Pines and Pinehurst, and military facilities at Fort Bragg,” Hardee proclaimed.

Donald Ross, the famous golf architect who had designed seven Sandhills area courses (Pinehurst Nos. 1-4, Pine Needles, Mid Pines and Southern Pines Country Club) had been dead for a decade, so Hardee went to the next best thing in the Carolinas architecture business. Ellis Maples as a teenager worked for his father in building and maintaining the first four courses at Pinehurst Country Club, and later he worked in the golf shop at Pinehurst and as assistant greenkeeper at Mid Pines and Pine Needles. Maples supervised the construction of the last Ross design, Raleigh Country Club, in the late-1940s, and in 1953 decided against becoming a golf professional and focused on architecture.

His career over three decades before his death in 1984 included Grandfather Golf & Country Club and the Country Club of North Carolina (Dogwood Course), two of the finest courses in the state.

“Dad and I were pretty much alike in a couple of ways,” says Dan Maples, Ellis’ son and himself a noted golf architect. “We both belong to the Donald Ross school, which includes designing courses for all golfers. That’s more difficult to accomplish today than in Dad’s day because we now have to deal with environmental issues.”

Miller never forgot playing at Whispering Pines back in the day, and in 2025, the opportunity arose for Miller and business partner Haresh Tharani to form a management concern called Rolling Pines LLC that purchased Whispering Pines (as well as Foxfire Country Club to the west of Pinehurst). Their first move was to hire golf architect Kyle Franz to renovate the Pines Course (the original layout at Whispering Pines), and it opened in late September.

“When I first saw the course, I saw loads of incredible potential,” Franz says. “It’s a really cool piece of land and a really cool golf course. The bones were there. It just needed freshening up. It’s on a great, sandy site with excellent drainage. I could not be any prouder of how it’s turned out.”

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 Miller, and over the next decade handled restorations at Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Southern Pines, each a golf course designed by Ross. In his research on Ross, Franz learned much about the Maples family.

“I have a huge fascination with their family and Frank Maples’ influence on Ross and Ellis,” Franz says. “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. This routing feels like a Ross routing. He worked for Ross for 25 years, so some of Ross rubbed off on him. The routing is Ross-like, the green pads feel very Ross-like.”

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’ work deserves more attention and credit.” PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst experience for more than three decades from his home in Chapel Hill. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.