This article was provided by the Convention and Visitors Bureau for the Village of Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen area.

Every famous town has a famous street, from Park Avenue in New York to Michigan Avenue in Chicago to Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. Along these boulevards you can find Gucci, Brooks Brothers and Saks.

In the Pinehurst/Southern Pines/Aberdeen area of North Carolina, there’s Midland Road. But it’s hardly of the commercial ilk of other well-known streets. Its products are Donald Ross and Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Rees Jones.

"Midland Road has more of a feel of the 17-mile drive on the Monterey Peninsula in California," says Marty McKenzie, a Pinehurst developer. "It has a soft feel, a pleasant feel."

Midland Road and its stately six-mile row of pine trees in the median sets the tone for this mecca of golf. Controversy has raged, in fact, over maintaining its aesthetic appeal.

From the second green of the Pinehurst No. 2 Golf Course at one end to the quaint village of Southern Pines at the other, Midland Road offers an interesting array of golf courses and lodges. More than one-third of the areas 41 courses are accessible via Midland Road.

There are courses by Ross, Nicklaus, Palmer, Jones and Dan Maples. There are 75-year-old hotels. There are understated retail outposts that offer crafts, jewelry and art. And there’s a lot of history.

The road runs in an east-west direction and originally was the route of the Pinehurst Railroad Corporation’s trolley line, constructed in 1895-96, that transported guests to the infant Pinehurst resort from the train depot in Southern Pines. A decade later, the trolley had been discontinued and Pinehurst’s Leonard Tufts, son of the resort’s founder James W. Tufts, offered to build half the road in 1907 if the town of Southern Pines paid for the rest.

Tufts completed his half of the road as scheduled, but Southern Pines ran out of money with a mile to go. So Southern Pines resident James Boyd contributed more than $1,000 to finance completion of the road. About all you say about this early road was that it was serviceable — if not easy to traverse. "The old sandy road was very uncomfortable, very tiresome and very unprogressive," an early 1910 issue of the Pinehurst Outlook said. As road-building technology improved over the years, the quality of the road improved.

Two lanes run in each direction, and the median is covered with pinestraw, shrubs and towering pines. There are few signs along the way, and those that do exist are understated and generally harmonize with their surroundings. The sign at the entrance to Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club for instance, features the resort’s name and pinecone logo carved from wood. Across the road, the brick columns at the entrance to Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club and its row of stand-alone cottages are painted white and adorned with bronze pineapples, the symbol of hospitality.

The offices of Ken Thomas Realty are located at the end of Midland Road in Southern Pines. Whenever Thomas is showing a newcomer around the area, the first thing he does is drive them out of his office parking lot, onto Midland Road toward Pinehurst.

"We drive down Midland Road and pass all these beautiful golf courses, and you’ve got all the green and the blue skies and all the pine trees. By the time we get to Pinehurst they’re sold on the area," says Thomas. "The transition from Southern Pines to Pinehurst is so graceful and beautiful that it really adds to the entire area."

There was even huge public outcry in the mid-19780s when state highway officials wanted to cut down the trees in the median for safety reasons. "People really put up a fuss and the highway people backed off," Thomas says. "People weren’t going to stand for that."

Today Midland Road officially begins at the west end just a few yards from the second green of Pinehurst No. 2 and a couple hundred yards from the center of the Village of Pinehurst. This end of Midland Road represents the cradle of American golf, as four courses at Pinehurst Country Club were built by Donald Ross from 1901 to 1918 and the nation’s first driving range was opened in 1913. All eight of the Pinehurst Country Club courses are open to guests of the Pinehurst Resort and its sister facility, the Manor Inn.

The road stretches for one-half mile along a row of houses that border the third and fifth holes of Pinehurst No. 2, and then comes to the well known traffic circle — the hub of Midland Road, U.S. Highway 15-501 and N.C. Highway 211. Visitors and locals alike use the traffic circle as a reference point, and it serves to separate the Pinehurst side of Midland Road from the Southern Pines side.

A quarter mile past that is the entrance to Pinehurst National, an exclusive residential community with a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. The course opened in 1989 and provided a fitting return for Nicklaus. As a crew-cutted 19-year-old, he won the 1959 North and South Open on No. 2, then returned as a professional in 1975 to take first in the World Open. And in 1985, he followed son Jackie around all weekend as the younger Nicklaus collected a Putter Boy Trophy on his own for winning the North and South.

A good drive and solid 8-iron further down the road is one of the Sandhills’ most popular shopping areas, the Midland Road Shops. Here you’ll find Midland Crafters, which has one-of-a-kind crafts, antiques and artwork, and next door to it is the Market Place, which includes a jewelry store, gift store, optical store and restaurant.

Across Midland Road is Midland Country Club, which includes a nine-hole golf course, clubhouse and The Dunes Table Restaurant, which is billed on the small sign at the entrance as "Pinehurst’s best-kept secret." The Dunes Table is named in honor of the old Dunes Club, which existed for years in a building across Midland Road, several hundred yards in back of where Midland Crafters is now. The Dunes Club was a popular restaurant, nightclub and casino until it burned down more than 20 years ago.

A little further down the road is the entrance to Pinehurst Plantation. It’s fitting that within a mile of a Nicklaus course is one designed by the golfer who was his chief rival during the 1960s, Arnold Palmer. Like Nicklaus, Palmer is delighted to be represented in the world’s most renowned hotbed of golf.

"Pinehurst is one of my favorite spots in the world," says Palmer. "I’d like to think our golf course would challenge Pinehurst No. 2, which I’ve always said is one of the great courses in the world."

Across Midland Road is Longleaf Country Club, which includes a charming Dan Maples golf course. Maples is the grandson of Frank Maples, who was the construction superintendent and greenskeeper alongside Donald Ross, and a rich golf heritage runs through his work. Longleaf is built on the old Starland Farms equestrian facility, and Maples has retained much of that old equestrian flavor. Longleaf is a real estate development and semi-private country club.

Next door to Longleaf is Talamore, a public course designed by Rees Jones that was recently named by Golf Digest Magazine as the No. 5 new public course of 1992. The 6,720-yard course offers a variety of challenges, from short, uphill par-4s like the 10th to stern, demanding par-4s like the 19th, which requires a tee shot over a lake and runs 450 yards from tee to green.

Less than a quarter of a mile from Talamore is Knollwood Fairways, a popular driving range and par-3 course; and, about a half mile further down Midland Road, the golf menu comes to a classy end with two more Ross jewels. Both are parts of resorts built in the early 1920s by the Tufts family that founded and operated the original Pinehurst facility. The Carolina Hotel would fill up so often, the Tufts built Mid Pines in 1921 and Pine Needles in 1927. Both are now under ownership by the family of noted teaching pro Peggy Kirk Bell.

The original Pine Needles resort now exists as a rest home, but the Bell family has built a row of Swiss-style chalets on another side of the property that house up to 144 guests at any time. The course hosted the 1996 U.S. Women’s Open and will do so again in 2001.

And another half mile up the road, you enter downtown Southern Pines and Midland Road turns into Broad Street. It’s quite a trip.