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D ECEMBER 1894. The Seaboard Florida Limited, some eight hours out of Jacksonville, Florida, broke through clouds of black smoke belching from the locomotive's stack and rolled to a clanking halt at the bustling railroad station at Southern Pines, North Carolina. The dozen first-class Pullman cars were filled to capacity with distraught, frustrated, wealthy Northerners forced to return to their wintry homes after a record freeze paralyzed the state just as the quail season opened. Daytime temperatures hovered in the 20s, destroying all the citrus groves and killing all of the regal royal palm trees in Florida. Resorts and hotels shut their doors, as there was no way to keep their guests warm. Men buttoned up to the chin in heavy overcoats and women swaddled in furs stepped onto the platform to stretch their legs, but when they felt the warmth of the sun beaming down from a cloudless sky, they quickly unpeeled their winter wrappings. The transformation of the cold and fretful to a calm and content congregate of fellow travelers failed to escape the Sporting Life by Laurie bogart WiLeS A legendAry gun club is on the cusp of being reborn. notice of one among them, and when, after a half-hour, three blasts from the engine and the conductor's shrill whistle and cry of "All aboard!" summoned the passengers, all but one returned to their seats. With clanging wheels and black soot spewing from the smokestack, the Seaboard Florida Limited resumed its northern trek. The gentleman who had remained behind unbuttoned his vest and overcoat, unwound the wool scarf from around his neck, and, with feet spread apart and his face lifted to the sky, swallowed deep gulps of pungent piney air. "My God!" he cried out with delight. "Hale was right!" "Hale" was this fellow's great friend, the famed historian and Unitarian minister Reverend Edward Everett Hale, who had sent him a telegram the week before urging him to disembark at Southern Pines on his return north and "breathe the healthful piney air." There were healing powers in the Carolina Sandhills—a unique, mystical topography of ancient beach dunes that separated the Piedmont Plateau from the Coastal Plain—and the man on the station platform felt it. His name was James Walker Tufts. The son of a modest gunsmith, Tufts was a Yankee captain of industry, and though only 60 years old at this point in our story, he had already undergone five abdominal surgeries at a time when general anesthesia was yet in practice. Neither the fortune he had accumulated from his James W. Tufts Quadraplate Silver Company nor the vast wealth he realized from his invention of the soda fountain machine and his Tufts Arctic Soda Fountain Company, which manufactured and distributed one to every drug store in the country, could buy him health. Imagine how, with that first breath of piney air, he must have felt. Then and there, Tufts determined to make the Carolina Sandhills his winter retreat; here, he and his family would remain from just after Thanksgiving through Easter. Whether he realized then that untold millions would follow cannot be told, but Tufts was a man of vision, and men like that can see beyond horizons. James Walker Tufts crossed Broad Street, took a room at Prospect House, inquired if 34 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S