Today Moore County has approximately three dozen golf courses and the 10th highest tourism economy in the state of North Carolina. In fiscal year 2023-24, hotels in the Sandhills reported a 21.7 percent increase over the previous year in room collections.
The U.S. Open at Pinehurst in 2024 drew more than 225,000 people to town and, according to a USGA study, generated a $200 million economic impact.
Heady numbers, indeed.
There are only a handful of people left who can remember when there were just four courses at Pinehurst Resort, when the town shut down for the summer, when the second hole on Pinehurst No. 2 was a challenging par-4 negotiated with a driver off the tee and a long iron into the green.
Bill Sledge is one of them.
“We lived in Elm Cottage, which is about 300 yards from the second fairway of No. 2,” says Sledge, who turned 94 in July 2025. “We were open eight months of the year. No one was here in the summer. My dad and I would walk to the second fairway, take a few clubs and a shag bag, and he taught me to play golf. He was maybe a 12- or 13-handicap, which wasn’t bad considering he didn’t play golf until he came to Pinehurst. But that’s where it started. I’ve loved the game all my life.”
Sledge is proud of having shot his age nearly 1,700 times by the time he gave up the game in 2024 because of dwindling eyesight.
“We didn’t have high school golf teams when I was growing up,” he says. “Then, early in my adult years, all I played was tennis. I got back into golf probably in the 1980s and have loved every minute of it.”
Isham Sledge was born in Nash County in 1892 and attended Kings Business College in Raleigh. He was hired as a bookkeeper in 1911 by Leonard Tufts, the son of Pinehurst founder James W. Tufts. Tufts incorporated the business in 1920 and made Sledge secretary/treasurer. Over time, Sledge became a key player in the resort’s evolution until his death in 1958.
“An accountant for Pinehurst came to Dad’s funeral and told me if not for my dad, Mr. Tufts wouldn’t have been able to keep Pinehurst after the Depression,” Sledge says. “My dad put together a consortium of banks that enabled Mr. Tufts to continue to operate. When I started to work for the company in 1955, we were still paying off that debt. It was like $150,000 a year, which doesn’t seem like anything today, but it was a lot of money in those days.”
Isham Sledge first lived in an apartment on the second floor of the Department Store Building, which now houses the Villager Deli, the Gentleman’s Corner and other businesses. He bought Elm Cottage on Cherokee Road in 1920 when he married, and the house remained in the family for some 70 years. Bill Sledge was born in 1931 (he had two older sisters, Nancy and Katherine) and has lived for many years with his wife, Ruby, in their home at Country Club of North Carolina.
“I think the village has done a good job retaining its charm,” Bill Sledge says. “I am sure Robert Dedman makes plenty of money, but they plow so much right back into the property. It’s been amazing to watch. You can’t really change the village. We’ve never allowed any McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken or any of that sort of thing.”
Leonard Tufts had four children — Richard, James, Albert and Esther. The three boys stayed in Pinehurst and were part of the mid-1900s management team, and their sister lived in New Hampshire. Isham bought Esther’s share of the company after World War II. Bill attended Davidson College and Cornell University and entered the hotel management business. He worked at Pinehurst for about a decade during the latter stages of the Tufts era, which ended in 1970 when Diamondhead bought the resort.
Sledge remembers the great amateur golfer Frank Stranahan coming with his parents every April. The Stranahans owned the Champion Spark Plug Co. in Toledo, Ohio, and their wealth allowed Frank the freedom to travel the country and play the amateur golf circuit. He won the 1949 North & South Amateur over local favorite Harvie Ward, who had beaten Stranahan the previous year.
“We had a three-bedroom suite on the second floor right over the entrance to the hotel,” Sledge says. “The Stranahans would stay a month in April, and the North & South Amateur was always played at that time. Frank loved to lift weights, and this was long before hotels had fitness centers. The bellmen always talked about having to carry Frank’s weights and barbells upstairs.”
Sledge was in college at Davidson when the 1951 Ryder Cup was held at Pinehurst.
“My dad gave me and my best friend a couple of tickets, and so we got to see Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson and Sam Snead up close,” he says. “All the great names were here.”
The ’51 Ryder Cup and the North & South Open held immediately afterward were watershed events in the resort’s history. Richard Tufts was running the resort at the time and became disenchanted with the professionals’ demands for higher purses. It aggravated him that half of the United States team that beat Great Britain and Ireland in September of 1951 did not stay in town to play in the North & South, which over its half-century existence was considered one of golf’s major championships.
Tufts discontinued the North & South Open and in its place established the North & South Seniors, which started in 1952 and still runs today.
“That was probably the most successful thing Pinehurst ever did under the Tuftses, creating the North & South Seniors,” Sledge says. “That filled the hotels. Not only ours but the Magnolia and Manor and Pine Crest and everything else in town. The golfers brought their wives, and it was a big thing — the golf and the social element. Then a group called the Three Score and Ten started coming the week after the North & South Seniors. That was two weeks of big business.”
After a two-decade hiatus from hosting professional golf events, Pinehurst and the PGA Tour reunited in 1973 with the one-off World Open. The Tour visited Pinehurst for a decade, then returned for the 1991 and ’92 Tour Championships. The dominoes by then were falling toward a relationship with the USGA and a run of four U.S. Opens from 1999 through 2024.
Now Pinehurst has its North & South Seniors and four more U.S. Opens on the calendar.
“It’s turned out pretty well for everyone,” Sledge says. “And to think, there wasn’t a soul in town in July when I was coming along.”
