Tufts Archives

In 1895 James Walker Tufts, a Boston businessman who had made his fortune in soda fountains, bought several thousand acres of cut-over, sandy pine land in the North Carolina Sandhills. His idea was novel for the time, a planned health resort where people from the cold North could spend the winter in a mild climate and clean pine air. He hired the landscape firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, designers of New York's Central Park, to lay out the village.

The result was Pinehurst, a carefully planned community of curving streets, a central green, inns, cottages, and gardens, built almost from scratch in the pines. The Tufts family ran and shaped it for generations, and the archive preserves the plans, correspondence, and photographs that document this rare, deliberate creation of an entire American town.

Pinehurst became one of the cradles of golf in the United States. Guests took to the game so eagerly that Tufts laid out courses, and in 1900 he brought in the young Scottish-born designer Donald Ross, who would spend much of his life shaping the Pinehurst courses, above all the celebrated No. 2 course, into some of the most influential in the country. Pinehurst has since hosted many national championships.

The Tufts Archives hold a deep record of this golf history, from early photographs and scorecards to correspondence and course plans, tracing how a winter pastime for resort guests grew into a serious center of the American game. For students of golf, it is one of the richest small collections anywhere.

Beyond golf, the collection is a window into the daily life of a resort village across more than a century. There are thousands of historic photographs of the village, its people, and its landscape, along with letters, ledgers, maps, and ephemera. Among the correspondents documented are notable figures of the era who visited or wrote to the Tufts family, from inventors to public figures of the Gilded Age.

The archive also records the wider Sandhills, the Olmsted plan, the building of the inns and cottages, and the community that grew up around them. Housed within the working village library, it is open to visitors and researchers alike, a quiet room where the story of Pinehurst is kept.

Just outside the archive lies the village the papers describe, a walkable green ringed by historic inns, shops, and cottages beneath tall pines, still recognizably the place Olmsted's firm laid out. Beyond it spread the Sandhills, a region of sandy soil, longleaf pine, horse farms, and golf courses, with the towns of Southern Pines and Aberdeen close by. This part of central North Carolina was long home to Native peoples, including groups related to the Tuscarora, before European settlement.

The mild seasons that first drew winter guests still make spring and fall the loveliest times to visit, when the weather is clear and the region's golf and equestrian events fill the calendar. A stop at the archive gives depth to a stroll through the village and a drive through the surrounding horse country and pine forest.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.