Cultivating Leisure: Tourism, Progressive Agriculture, and Technologies of Landscape at Pinehurst, North Carolina, 1895–1935

Agricultural science and technology were central elements in creating a tourist landscape in the southeastern United States, at the Pinehurst resort, around the turn of the twentieth century. Pinehurst offers a case study for thinking about how much work, in terms of human labor, meaning-making, and natural resource use, goes into creating a place for recreation—and how agriculture extends beyond commodity crop production. The growth of golf turf on the poor soil of the Carolina sandhills region relied upon intensive resource use and an approximation of convertible husbandry, a system that was not widely prevalent in the Southeast.