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36 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S T ufts built the Pinehurst Gun Club in his own backyard, even as his cottage and The Resort's 40 guest cottages, the Holly Inn, and the village itself were under construction. A native of Massachusetts, he had grown up hunting wild game for the family table and worked in his father's smithy until he became an apprentice pharmacist at age 15. By middle age, illness relegated his engagement in hunting and target shooting to that of an enthusiastic spectator. An active man nonetheless, Tufts was not content to just sit on his back porch and watch others break targets; he determined to establish target shooting and quail hunting as Pinehurst Resort's premier outdoor sports. Thus, Pinehurst became the first resort gun club in America. Confident he could attract affluent Northerners who desired to extend their bird-shooting season, Tufts leased 40,000 acres teeming with native bobwhites and engaged local guides whose understanding of quail was as natural to them as Webster's way with words. Pinehurst Kennels provided excellent gundogs, which James' son, Leonard, established by breeding setters and pointers that by 1912 would rank among the top bloodlines in the country. Soon "quail trains" were departing three times a week from New York, affording lavishly appointed Pullman cars complete with fine dining and comfortable sleeping compartments for wingshooters traveling to Pinehurst with gun and dog for company. Trap shooters made the journey, too, competing in Pinehurst Gun Club's tournaments, which offered some of the largest cash prizes of any competitive sport, including horse racing. New England hunters, used to swinging design Central Park in New York. By the end of his long and storied career, Olmsted had amassed a body of work including 800 parks, cities, and public spaces and sanctuaries, culminating in the Carolina Sandhills when the "father of landscape architecture in America" got off the train at Southern Pines. Feeble and in poor health himself, Tuft's quintessential New England village south of the Mason- Dixon Line would be Olmsted's final work—the resort town of Pinehurst, North Carolina, which would become known as "the cradle of golf in America." But it would be a dozen years before Pinehurst Resort became known as a golf destination. Donald Ross, a Scotsman who was named the resort's resident golf professional in 1900 (and would in time be acknowledged as the greatest golf architect in the history of the game), opened Pinehurst No. 2 in 1907, calling it "the fairest test of championship golf I have ever designed." However, virtually from the moment Tufts broke ground in 1895, Pinehurst was established as the undisputed mecca of sports shooting in America, a distinction it would hold for almost a century. any land was for sale, found 500 acres, took out his wallet and paid for it . . . and in short order purchased 5,500 more. He sent a telegram to his wife that he would be late returning home, though definitely in time for Christmas, and sent another telegram to his friend and architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who was at George Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate completing his greatest private commission. Would he, Tufts wired, stop at Southern Pines on his train journey home? He wanted Olmsted to design a village. That Tufts saw beauty in land that lay parched and barren, raped of century-old longleaf pines sacrificed for the production of turpentine, was a miracle. That Olmstead had come upon this place 40 years before was another. He had ventured into the Sandhills when he was The New York Daily Times' young roving reporter in the Confederate South. His commentaries on secession and observations of slavery established Olmsted as one of the leading influencers of Northern sentiment before the Civil War. It is the career for which he is unremembered; the one that would distinguish his life began when he won a competition in 1858 to A big crowd watches Annie Oakley and other shooting experts perform in front of the log lodge at Pinehurst, the first resort gun club in America.