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By Tom Crosby
(July 2008) Tall spruce trees majestically line the Village of Pinehurst’s Carolina Vista, framing the approach to the Carolina Hotel, one of the oldest and most historic hotels in the south.
Passing between a pair of four-foot high white brick columns, a circular entrance road surrounds a lush green lawn with waist-high hedges reading “Pinehurst 1895.”
It was 1895 that the first hotel - the Holly Inn - was built and became the genesis for the Village of Pinehurst. Six years later the Carolina Hotel opened, built by Pinehurst Founder James Walker Tufts to handle the Holly Inn’s overflow, and constructed in an H-shape in the Colonial Revival Style with a signature octagonal cupola over the center pavilion. It is one of the few all-wooden hotels still in existence on the East Coast.
 Today, this sleepy, genteel Southern town boasts antique stores, restaurants, boutiques and candy shops with business fueled by the steady stream of guests at the trio of hotels that comprise the Pinehurst Resort – Carolina Hotel, Holly Inn and Manor House.
The resort queen is the cream white, four-story, plantation-style Carolina Hotel, with 230 rooms and rated by AAA as a classic, historic, large-scale Four Diamond hotel. The resort king is golf, with more courses (eight) than any other North American resort and host - both past and future - to PGA Golf championships.
 Decorating the halls of the hotel or the clubhouse (which is used for three of the eight courses, including legendary #2), are photographs, placards and championship winner lists. Even those who aren’t golf fans can’t help but recognize those who have teed it up here - Bobby Jones, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Payne Stewart, Sergio Garcia, Greg Norman and Tiger Woods.
An extensive landscaping design by Frederick Law Olmsted exhibits lavishly and beautifully styled gardens of hollies, azaleas, gardenias, camellias and year-round blooms.
Most rooms were renovated in 2008 with flat screen televisions. Premium bedding, floor to ceiling marble bathrooms with pedestal sinks, larger desks and new floor and wall coverings.
The Carolina Dining Room has imported Italian Murano crystal chandeliers and a famous three-lane morning buffet and the Ryder Club lounge off the lobby has a sweeping veranda with a not-to-be-missed Carolina bagpiper performing at dusk each evening from spring to fall. (Updated July 2008)
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