By Bion. H. Butler
In summing up the advantages of a community as a place to live, a great many factors must be considered before the total is reached. Golf and polo and good roads and the ephemeral things of that sort have their weight, and to be candid they have a lot of weight. But the thing I like most about Pinehurst is the influence it exerts in the less enthusiastic forms of enjoyment. If I should be asked what I regard at the most valuable feature of Pinehurst I would say without having to think twice that it is the wholesome stimulus the place affords the people of the big community of which Pinehurst is the geographical center. So many wholesome conceptions have their origin in Pinehurst, not only for the welfare of the village itself, but also for the gain of the whole neighborhood. It is at Pinehurst that we who live in the country round get many of our best ideas of rural and village progress, of road work, of home improvement, of shrubbery designs of good cattle, of good hogs, of grades in poultry, for instance, of making the whole farm area attractive to the eye, and lots of things of that character.
Pinehurst was one of the most forceful pioneers in road building in all the South. To be sure Pinehurst needs good roads, but in striving to get good roads for Pinehurst good roads came for the rest of the community. So we all drive on good roads all over the state, and even in Virginia Pinehurst influences have enabled the roads to be put on a much more serviceable basis. Pinehurst has had a leavening effect on the community, the county, the state and adjacent states. This seems like a somewhat broad general statement, but it is so apparent to any of us who observe what goes on about us that it runs no risk of dispute.
Yet these somewhat material things do not impress me as the most wholesome influences of Pinehurst. The new church has been a pet admiration of mine from the time I saw the preliminary plans when it was projected. It had its origin in a little broader horizon than some churches, and it drew its needed backing from many directions. But it is such a commanding structure and striking in its ecclesiastical simplicity that it seems to me it must appeal in its mute way to many a man or woman whose interest might be lacking in some churches. There is a personality about churches as well as about people. Sixty years ago as a boy I used to go to church and Sunday school in a little red brick Methodist church in a mountain town in Pennsylvania. Then I left that neighborhood. Two or three years ago I was back in the town again one Sunday morning and an old time friend suggested we go the Methodist church to Sunday school. We headed for the corner I clearly recalled, but a little farther down street he turned into a magnificent new building and informed me that this was the church now. I did not follow but went to the old church just beyond. It had not opened its doors yet, and I went on. Perhaps the new church is just as good as the old one, but it lacked all the memories, and I would not know where to put my hat,, or where my class of 60 years ago belonged, nor anything else that was personality in the Methodist church in that town as I remember it. Personality counts for a lot with a church.
And there is a personality to Pinehurst in the frequent gatherings of such societies as the Forum and the Colony club, and those others where eminent and capable men are drafted as speakers before the bunch that gathers. Men in the foremost ranks of life’s work foregather at Pinehurst and thoroughly equipped individuals are inducted into service at each succeeding meeting. The captains of industry, the leaders in education, statesmen, jurists, doctors men of all callings and on a common footing, discuss live issues around the tables and Pinehurst is in winter season when big men are present much like a miniature copy of Oxford, that great English university, where education is largely a process of talking and hearing able educators talk, and where wisdom is showered from every fount and source.
Eight or 10 pairs of ornately decorated golf hosiery under the table at dinner may be the basement structure of a highly entertaining and interesting top story that affords more pleasure than anything else that you fall in with in a winter sojourn in the Sandhills. Pinehurst is not a religious retreat nor a graduate school by any means. It merely has these side lines that give variety to the more active physical entertainments. We who live in the community have some through years of habit to look to Pinehurst for much of the extraordinary phase of life, the theatre, the music, the better grade of picture shows, for no other kind gets past that high priest of censors, Charlie Picquet, who is neither highbrow nor hardboiled, but who knows both types so well that whatever fools him has on him a joke, and that puts it in the class of the humorous.
Then another thing at Pinehurst is that these attractions that bring men and women into more cordial touch with each other tend to mix the mass, and to exhibit the fine qualities of character, and it is surprising what pleasure comes from the acquaintances that follow this informal contact. I have thought that if I ever attain to such height in public eye that I am asked for a biography with its fixed questions, when I answer the inquiry as to where I was educated, I would say in the crude schools of rural Pennsylvania of half a century and more ago, with a postgraduate course in the University of Pinehurst.
From page 6 of the Pinehurst Outlook, Feb. 7, 1925.
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068725/1925-02-07/ed-1/seq-6/#words=FEBRUARY+7%2C+1925
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