“We need a county slogan,” I over-heard somebody say during a break at last week’s second Moore County Summit.

“How about ‘The Middle of Nowhere’?” somebody else replied.

Whoever said it (I didn’t catch his name) was joking. I don’t expect to see such a motto proudly displayed on bumper stickers. But when you get right down to it, this place we call home does have a middle-of-nowhere quality about it. But in a good sense. Far from being a weakness, this blessed remoteness from the rest of the world has always been one of our greatest strengths.

It is, indeed, exactly what prompted James Walker Tufts to choose this locale as the place to build his dream village, Pinehurst. Others shook their heads and thought the Boston soda-fountain magnate had gone off the deep end. The Moore County of 1895 — a logged-over backwater described as “a barren and poverty-stricken belt,” a “sand bank where even the thinly scattered pine trees are stunted, where the wire grass stands in scattered clumps, few and far between” — must have seemed the last place in the world for a vacation and retirement getaway.

Even at today’s highway speeds, we’re still two or three hours from the beach, three or four hours from the mountains, an hour or two away from Charlotte or Raleigh, six hundred fifty feet above sea level — smack in the middle of nowhere, in short, with no spectacular scenery or notable natural bodies of water. We live in a kind of neutral hinterland where three watersheds and three state economic development regions come together like tectonic plates.

But that’s precisely why people come here, isn’t it? — to get away from it all.

Even from a geological or ecological point of view, we got where we are because an accident of continental development placed us on an out-of-the-way edge of something big. As The Pilot’s John Chappell reminded us in a recent column about Northern Moore’s promotional decision to start calling itself “the Foothills,” Moore County once perched on the rim of a great inland sea roamed by exotic, long-extinct seaside species.

Through unimaginable eons of waves crashing down on it and pulverizing rock in various places as the sea level rose and fell, the land around here accumulated great amounts of one thing that all seashores accumulate: sand. Lots of sand. Reefs of sand. Piles of sand. Dunes of sand. Layers of sand that still sometimes run a hundred feet deep. In places, even great hills of sand.

In turn, these now-landlocked Sandhills and their unique natural environment attracted various specialized forms of life that like out-of-the-way places. Longleaf pines. Red-cockaded woodpeckers. And in modern years, southern Moore County has proven irresistible to immense numbers of two invasive species particularly well adapted to the Sandhills environment: golfers and horse people.

The latter come because of our unique combination of footing and terrain. As our equestrian correspondent, Sue Smithson, once explained it: “Ocala, Fla., has sand but no hills. Middleburg, Va., has hills but no sand. Southern Pines, which means as much to equestrians as Pinehurst does to golfers, has it all.”

The fact that Moore County straddles the very edge of the Sandhills region, one foot in, one foot out, helps explain why its upper and lower halves differ so completely from each other. Different soils, different trees, different ecosystems, different worlds. So dramatic is that divide that golfers who play the newly refurbished Little River golf course midway between Pinehurst and Carthage will tell you that they play the front nine in the Sandhills and the back nine in the Piedmont. Or is it the other way around?

Because the upper end is populated by salt-of-the-earth folks who can often trace their ancestries back to the Revolution and the lower end is such that you can hardly make a chip shot without beaning a recent Yankee transplant, the same thing can be said of Moore County that is often said of the state of Florida: Its northern end is Southern, and its southern end is Northern.

We Moore Countians, then, live our lives on the far edges of other people’s worlds, which I suppose is just another way of saying the middle of nowhere. I don’t know about you, but I kind of like it that way.