Golftown Journal
Saving a Soul
Defending the identity of Pinehurst
By Lee Pace
Feature Photo: John May, James Van Camp and Bruce Cunningham
At 83 years of age, Jim Van Camp rises every morning, puts on a dress shirt and necktie, and goes to work in one of the oldest buildings in the village of Pinehurst. He takes the elevator to the third floor of the Theatre Building, which opened in 1923 and for decades was the hot spot for evening entertainment. Now his law firm leases an office complex at the top of the hexagonal structure conceived in the fertile mind of architect Aymar Embury II, and Van Camp settles in each morning with three other attorneys and seven paralegals at his disposal, not to mention a black Lab named Tweed and a Löwchen named Mr. Pringle.
“At my age, I should be retired, but I don’t know what the hell I’d do,” Van Camp says. “I’m not a big gardener, I don’t like mowing grass, I’m not married so I don’t have a bunch of honey-do lists. I like getting up in the morning and knowing I have something to do.
“I love the practice of law. I love the challenge. I love helping someone save time, save money, save their lives if we’re talking a capital case.”
Or in one very special case, save a town, a golf course and a way of life.
Pinehurst existed for 75 years beginning in 1895 as a “benevolent dictatorship” under the auspices of the founding Tufts family. The specter of needing to make major capital improvements and potential inheritance taxes for the generations after patriarch James W. Tufts prompted the family in the late 1960s to look to sell the resort, five golf courses and an entire town with commercial buildings, a police and fire department and all the infrastructure, and thousands of acres of undeveloped land.
The buyer in December 1970 was the Diamondhead Corporation, which was founded by Maxton native Malcom McLean, a former truck driver who made a fortune in the 1950s and ’60s creating a new industry — the container shipping business. Diamondhead had resort and residential development operations in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, and moved quickly into Pinehurst, bringing bulldozers and carpenters by the dozens.
“Diamondhead sold dirt, that’s what they did,” Van Camp says. “They bought 8,000 acres. Their plan was to sell the dirt, make a profit and get out. There was no municipal government back then, no restrictions on them at all.”
Diamondhead built condos within 15 feet of some of the fairways of the No. 3 and No. 5 courses on the west side of N.C. 5, some of them octagonal-shaped units derided then as now as looking like little spaceships. The company was encroaching on Marshall Park, a circular preserve in the middle of the village named in honor of Gen. George Marshall, who lived in Pinehurst following World War II. And it had plans to build condos in a triangle of pine forest between the first, 17th and 18th holes of No. 2, and to erect more commercial structures along the fourth fairway.
A Pinehurst Country Club member and resident named Stuart Paine said enough. He formed a group called “Concerned Citizens of Pinehurst” and looked for a lawyer to challenge Diamondhead’s aggressiveness in court.
That’s where Van Camp, 32 at the time and a partner in the law firm of Seawell, Pollock, Fullenwider, Van Camp and Robbins, entered the picture.
“I have no idea why Stuart hired me,” Van Camp says. “I had had some successes at trial, but I was young. I’m not sure he didn’t talk to other people, and they said, ‘Forget it.’ He was probably working down his list. He said, ‘I have $10,000. What can you do?’”
Van Camp and a team that included attorneys John May and Bruce Cunningham, each of them 26 and one year out of law school, set off over the next year to build a case, which was tried in Moore County Superior Court in Carthage in September 1973.
“The sense of the case was there was a culture here, an environment that was unique,” Van Camp reflects today. “Pinehurst has always been unique. No. 2 was part of that culture. As a matter of fact, it was one of the reasons there was a culture. To destroy that element of the culture would have destroyed the culture and the environment of the village. I did not have a lot of case law, but the argument sounded good.”
Among the exhibits Van Camp produced were aerial photos of the development around the No. 3 and No. 5 courses, and photographs capturing the history and ambience of a village designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted, the “father of American landscape architecture.” Van Camp was heartened that the judge, the Honorable A. Pilston Godwin, was a strict traditionalist, a man who chided attorneys if they were not dressed properly and could accurately ascertain by hearing a man’s surname if his ancestors were from England or Scotland.
“I really tried to sell the ambience of this place,” Van Camp says. “That was my argument. ‘Your honor, this just can’t happen. We need your help. This is what you’re being asked to destroy.’ The judge bought into it. He told their lawyers, ‘You better meet with Mr. Van Camp, because you’re not going to like my ruling.’”
Van Camp and the defendant’s attorneys worked out a settlement that prevented Diamondhead from building any structure along No. 2 with the exception of the already planned World Golf Hall of Fame headquarters, which would sit to the east side of the course’s fourth green and fifth tee and open in the fall of 1974. In addition, Diamondhead could not build more than 11 condominiums per acre on land adjoining a golf course; could not build any dwelling within 30 feet of a golf course; and could never use Marshall Park for any purpose beyond recreation.
Imagine the ramifications had No. 2 been blasphemed with goofy condos and 1970s-style commercial structures. Could that look have infected the village itself? Where would it have stopped? What would have been left when Diamondhead eventually lost the club and the resort to the banks in 1982? Would there have been enough for a resurrection project of a “fallen angel,” to use the words of Robert Dedman Sr., who bought Pinehurst in 1984 and revived it with the help of son Robert Jr. into the golfing colossus that will host its fourth U.S. Open Championship in June?
We’ll never know. But you want the odds?
“There’s no telling what this place would look like,” Van Camp says. “It was a time and place, and something tragic was going to happen. We had the right cause from Stuart, some smart young attorneys in John and Bruce, we had the right judge. I was just the mouthpiece at the hearings. And it worked. It kept what was important about this place. The whole character of this town would have changed.”
With that, Jim Van Camp turns back to his legal pad and briefs, rubs Mr. Pringle’s head and plows through his afternoon. Outside the Village Theatre, the carillon in The Village Chapel peals out as it does at the top of every hour. It’s just another beautiful day in Pinehurst. PS
Author Lee Pace chronicled Payne Stewart’s magical week in 1999 in his book The Spirit of Pinehurst, published in 2004.