Founding Farmers, Sandhills, Oct. 28, Sou. Pines

Founding Farmers: the Sandhills in the Country Place Era

Join Moore County Historical Association Past President, Ray Owen, Sunday, October 28, at 2:00 pm, at the Southern Pines Civic Club, to explore life in the Sandhills in the period of time the Library of American Landscape History refers to as the "American Country Place Era."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a remarkable breed of developer/philanthropist were drawn to the Sandhills. The Tufts family of Pinehurst, the Boyd family of Southern Pines, and the Page family of Aberdeen used their fortunes and influence to transform the region, urging large numbers of educated and affluent northerners to move to the Sandhills. Inspired by an interest in nature and a belief in the civilizing influence of rural life, country estates designed by prestigious architects and landscapers proliferated in the area.

In March of 1913, representatives from sixteen towns in the Sandhills united to form regional cooperative called the Sand Hill Board of Trade. The area represented formed a circle 30 miles in diameter with the resort towns at the center, and embraced the entire Sandhills. The group sought to encourage farming in the rural areas surrounding the resort towns, and to promote country society in an effort to keep farmers on the farms.

President Theodore Roosevelt wrote extensively about the Sand Hill Board of Trade in 1917 in his book The Foes of Our Own Household. Roosevelt writes: “It is composed of farmers, merchants, doctors—all the leading citizens. By its activities it has shown that it represents the organized Sandhill community, covering an area as large as Rhode Island and having a population of some ten thousand souls.”

Many of the individuals significant in this national movement had Moore County ties. Walter Hines Page, with his family firmly rooted in Southern Moore County, was a partner in the Doubleday, Page & Company, and publisher of the culturally persuasive magazines Country Life in America, and The Worlds Work that actively promoted the movement nationally. In addition, Walter Page served on President Roosevelt’s seven-member Country Life Commission, and on the General Education Board of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Located in the southern half of the Sand Hill Board of Trade circle was Broadacre, the 22,000 acre estate of Frederick Gates, chief advisor to Rockefeller. Above the northeast rim of the orb was Overhills, the 30,000 acre estate of Percy Rockefeller, the nephew of John D. Rockefeller. The 125,000 acre Fort Bragg tract wrapped around much of the eastern arc of the Sand Hill Board of Trade circle.

In an address given in 1923 at the Southern Pines City Park, forest engineer Thomas Ivey describes this land tract as the Sandhills very own national park. The western region of the circle was populated by more than fifty “county families,” most of them educated at ivey league schools, who had come to the section to farm. Southern Pines writer/developer James Boyd worked for a time as an editor for Country Life in America. Boyd introduced architect Aymar Embury to Sandhills for his grand Weymouth estate, and for his Weymouth Heights development. Alfred B. Yeomans, a landscape architect from Chicago and a relative of the Boyds, moved to Southern Pines and began collaborating with Embury regionally. Leonard Tufts enlisted the services of noted landscape designer Warren Manning for his expensive plans for regional development, envisioning a wide-reaching kingdom of semi-rural grace and opulence, surrounded by a beautiful agrarian landscape.

Expressing his vision for the Sandhills in an interview in 1921, Leonard Tufts said: “ In a very few years, the whole country from Pinehurst eastward will be a big community of winter homes of well-to-do northerners who will establish in the county a concentration of small and camparatively large estates that will result in a settlement that will be unique.”

Ray Owen is an avid student of Moore County history, and has called Southern Pines home for more than thirty years. He is a published writer, and has served as a guest lecturer and curator for museums locally and statewide. His current work for MCHA involves planning for the restoration and interpretation of the Bryant House/McLendon Cabin site, traditionally held to be the earliest farmstead in the Sandhills region. Recent projects include the four-part lecture series Sandhills at a Crossroads with the Classical Design Foundation in Southern Pines, and the contribution a chapter for the upcoming book, North Carolina Redware: Origin of a Ceramic Tradition, for the University of Georgia Press.