2017
ESEEOLA The Magazine of Linville Resorts
DETAILS
TRADITIONS OUTDOORS
Little things add up to a “slice of heaven” in Linville.
Linville Golf Club remains a timeless classic.
Recreational nirvana from the trails to the streams.
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CONTENTS 4
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LODGE
DINING
It’s polished, it’s clean, it’s classic. The Eseeola Lodge is a beacon of good taste and warm welcomes for generations of travelers to the area.
A bountiful table created by a passionate chef and his talented staff draws discerning visitors from all points near and far.
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The humps and hollows Donald Ross crafted in the 1920s remain the bedrock of a golf experience embraced by golfers of all ilk.
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NATURE The Eseeola’s recently expanded and enhanced outdoors menu explores every stream, trail and lake in Linville Valley. Take in its majesty.
Etcetera 8 12 20 26 28
OF BACON AND BARK: Architect Henry Bacon set a design trademark with the bark that endures today. SEA TO THE HILLS: If it’s a summer Thursday in Linville, it must mean shrimp, crab and fish by the boatload. DEVIL IN THE DETAILS: From the rakes to the sand, the little things add up huge at Linville Golf Club. HIKING THE HOLLOWS: Long or short, steep or shallow, the trails offer beauty and fresh air. MOUNTAINS MAJESTY: The “High Country” is an eclectic and winsome mix of invigorating diversions.
Writer/Editor: Lee Pace • Graphic Design: Sue Pace Front Cover photo: Charlie Neufeld; Back Cover: Todd Bush Published by Linville Resorts Inc. For reservations and additional information, click or call www.eseeola.com • 800.742.6717
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Eseeola “A man’s accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail.”
— Statesman John Foster Dulles
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he big picture of this little nook and valley of Avery County, North Carolina, is quite impressive indeed. The ancient Blue Ridge Mountains loom high above Linville, with the peak of Grandfather Mountain standing 5,945 feet above sea level, and the crystal waters of Grandmother Creek meander through the valley in serpentine fashion, skirting the ancient, bark-covered Eseeola Lodge and providing intrigue and peril along the Donald Ross-designed golf course. There’s a pool, a lake, streams for fishing and a bountiful table. “My first visit there, I was overwhelmed with how lovely it was,” says Catherine Powell of Charleston, S.C., a regular summer visitor. “It’s a little slice of heaven,” says Bobby Weed, a native Floridian, golf course architect and frequent face around Linville. “This is hallowed ground, a very special world,” adds Terry Dale, sous chef in the Eseeola Lodge. “The scenery, the people—everyone is so friendly and warm and welcoming.” Yet it’s the little things around the lodge and club that combine to escalate the Eseeola Lodge and Linville Golf Club into travel nirvana. The grand sum of all the little parts make Linville for six months a year from May through October a winsome escape for lowlanders craving a cooling breeze and a respite from their kinetic lives. The details—where to begin? The finer points range from the bagpipe music heralding Sunday services at the tiny Presbyterian chapel next door to the handsome Audubon bird prints decorating the upstairs hallways of the lodge. They include the flowers cut daily from the gardens and displayed at every table along with lush table cloths from international purveyors like Garnier-
Thiebaut. Executive chef Patrick Maisonhaute holds a swatch of table cloth and rubs his thumb and fingers across the texture. “This place is a diamond in the rough,” he says. “Many places have not survived all the recessions the Eseeola has. Everything here is spot-on. Everything is in the right spot. It’s polished, it’s clean. That’s what makes the Eseeola Lodge. You do not find many places like this anymore.” The minutiae extends to the guest rooms with the velvety bathrobes and the French-milled soaps and lotions from L’Occitane, a company, incidentally, that requires potential customers to apply to purchase its products. And the mattresses—oh, the mattresses. “We do not scrimp on mattresses at all,” says John Blackburn, the Eseeola’s general manager since 1983. “Mattresses and bedding are a big deal. We get a lot of compliments on them. We change out every seven years, and that’s not an inexpensive venture. Our guests treasure a good night’s sleep, so it’s worth it.” The finer points of the Eseeola experience range from the puzzles and games for all to enjoy in the lodge’s expansive living room to a well-stocked library in a back enclave. Assistant general manager Brandon Wilson pays attention to the details by remembering your favorite wine to serve at dinner, and outdoors director Alan Burchell has just the just the right fly in his fishing bag to help you nab a prize trout along the Linville River. Much of the furniture
The flower beds and the meticulously groomed grounds around the Eseeola Lodge help create a calming environment for members and guests.
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is made by hand in a woodworking shop on the premises, and the sparking white bunker sand on the golf course is mined in nearby Spruce Pine and trucked to finer golf courses across the land—including one in Augusta, Ga. “I would call it ‘understated elegance,’” says Ms. Powell, who runs Senior Golfers of America and brings a group to Linville every summer. “The little touches make it special—gentlemen wearing jackets, for example. There is a blend of formality without being stuffy. That’s pretty rare to find these days, and it’s very refreshing.” It’s poetic, perhaps, as professor William James of Harvard University mused while visiting Linville all the way back in 1891. “At last, I have struck it rich here in North Carolina and am in the most peculiar and one of the most poetic places I have ever been in,” he wrote back home. That’s when the MacRae family of Wilmington was just beginning to build on the vision of what this corner of North Carolina could afford to travelers and vacationers long before the advent of air conditioning. The MacRaes had mining and manufacturing interests in the mountains in the late-1800s and identified Linville, tucked as it was beneath the splendorous peaks of Grandfather Mountain, as an ideal haven for recreation and relaxation. The area was “arranged with an order and symmetry as rare as it is beautiful,” noted an 1896 N.C. Board of Agriculture brochure. The MacRaes built the Eseeola Lodge (“Eseeola” being the Native American word for “river of cliffs”) in 1892 and soon after added a rudimentary 14-hole golf course that was eventually abandoned when Donald Ross came
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from Pinehurst in 1924 to design a new one. “There’s not much change in Linville from the early days,” says Wilmington’s Hugh MacRae II, great grandson of resort founder Donald MacRae. “The 18th hole and the first hole look almost exactly the same as they did 80 years ago. The drive back into Linville today—you could almost turn back the clock to the twenties and thirties and not much has changed.” An early ad for the resort chirped that Linville was the “Eden of the United States, a fairy land without a peer,” and it’s true that every element of the experience is a cut above. The original Eseeola burned in a fire in 1936, and the current lodge was once known as the Chestnut Lodge; it has 19 luxuriant guest rooms and five suites, serves breakfast and dinner, and guests have access to a multitude of recreation pursuits—golf, swimming, hiking, fishing, tennis, exercise in a new state-of-the-art fitness center and sun-bathing by the pool. Or there’s the age-old pastime of taking a nap. Turn on the ceiling fan, nestle into the goose-down pillow and resonate in an environment far greater than the sum of all its well-conceived little parts.
General Manager John Blackburn (center on facing page) and his staff have meticulously enhanced the Eseeola experience with carefully appointed guest rooms and public areas that are handsome yet comfortable.
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A Side Note++
Look the
Linville
It is known, simply, as “The Linville Look.” The Eseeola Lodge and the homes alongside the golf course have a rustic, distinctive appearance that add to the Linville aesthetic appeal.
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his architectural style is comprised of bark siding, originally from chestnut trees and now from poplar trees; exposed beams of unstripped logs in buildings’ interiors; and neo-Tudor structures with steeply pitched roofs and exteriors halftimbered in places and with a mix of brick and stucco in others. The genesis of this style was Henry Bacon, a well-known architect of the early 1900s best known for having designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Bacon grew up in Wilmington, N.C., and was friends with Donald MacRae Jr., the original developer of Linville. Included in the family’s archives in an elegant, handwritten letter from Bacon in 1911 in which he draws a sketch of his idea for the memorial that would begin being built in 1914. “Bacon designed some of its earliest buildings in an elegant, rustic mode suited to the mountain setting,” author Leslie Boney Jr. writes. “Using the abundant local chestnut bark and natural branches in artful fashion, he planned
All Saints Episcopal Church and also designed at least three cottages in similar style. His use of natural chestnut shingles and sheathing inside and out set a local pattern for the distinctive resort community, a mode that continued until the chestnut blight wiped out the great trees.” Harry Stearns, an MIT classmate of Nelson MacRae, Donald’s son, followed Bacon as Linville’s “company architect.” He favored a neoTudor design style that he incorporated into Bacon’s bark siding style. Stearns designed the present Eseeola Lodge, as well as many homes in Linville, some of his homes are visible along the 18th fairway. Though chestnut bark isn’t as readily available today, much at Linville Golf Club is covered in bark—from the cases for the water coolers to the handrails on the foot bridges. Today the poplar tree is used for the bark.
The Henry Bacon architectural style has endured for a century in Linville. At top is the “Strathshiel” home on Watauga Avenue and at bottom is All Saints Presbyterian Church.
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Dining
Executive Chef Patrick Maisonhaute has directed a multi-faceted food and beverage operation since 2006.
Maisonhaute T
oday every plate that comes out of the kitchen at the Eseeola Lodge, every lunch boxed for the golf course or sandwich nestled in a basket for a hike through the wilderness, has its genesis in Patrick Maisonhaute’s boyhood in France. Since Maisonhaute’s father was in the military and moved around quite a bit, Patrick spent much of his youth with his grandparents in the central France village of Sail-Sous-Couzan. He remembers a tidy homestead with a garden and a
Cuisine
few chickens, his grandfather tending the vegetables and his grandmother turning the fruits of those labors into nourishing meals. She would make salad dressing from scratch, mixing mustard, shallots, garlic and olive oil.
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Dining “And boom, there was our lunch,” says the lodge’s executive chef. “Today, no one makes their own dressing. They go to the grocery store and buy pre-made dressing with all the salt and sugar. You have no idea what all the ingredients are.” Maisonhaute waxes poetically and energetically about the process of meal preparation and enjoyment in France— each an art in itself. “When you sit down in Europe for dinner, you sit for three or four hours, you have course after course,” he says. “It’s a big event. You have a trained chef cooking for you. You dress up, you anticipate it. For me, food is very important. Food needs to be appealing to the eye as well as being very tasty. Presentation is important, you eat first with your eyes.” Therein lies the crux of the dining experience at the Eseeola Lodge and Linville Golf Club—taste, visual appeal, freshness, everything made on-site, in real-time. “This place has so much history, I’m so excited to be here,” says Maisonhaute, who started at the Eseeola in 2006. “You don’t mess around with tradition. That’s what I love about this place. I’m very fortunate to have traveled quite a bit in my life, I’ve worked at five-star hotels. But this feels like home.” He met his wife Toni while working in the West Indies and decided to “follow my heart” and move with her to her native North Carolina; they got married in 2002. He was working at the Louisiana Purchase restaurant in Banner Elk when Mr. Blackburn was looking to replace longtime chef John Hofland and asked some of the food vendors if they knew of a sharp chef who might be a good fit. “For me to be an outsider, Mr. Blackburn made me feel welcome,” Patrick says. “He opened the door, made me feel very much at home. I am motivated by the chance he took on me. I would never want to let him down.” Maisonhaute supervises an operation that during the summer will provide food and beverage at five locations— the Eseeola Dining Room, the Grill Room at the clubhouse, the pool pavilion, Camp Yonahnoka and the halfway house at the golf course. The lodge, grounds and camp area host frequent weddings and private parties up to 600 people. “We have 40-plus people working here,” he says. “We do a lot of business. We might do 130 people for lunch at the grill during the summer. It’s a big organization, a lot of people working together, working hard.” Patrick notes he does not have his name on his white 10
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chef’s jacket for a reason. “It is not about me,” he says. “It’s about us. Brigade is a word in the army. Teamwork. I’m just a piece of the puzzle. My dishwasher is as important as my chef. We all work in the same direction—to give service. I’ve been to all the positions in the kitchen. I have no problem going behind the line to cook, no problem at all.” Maisonhaute is expressive and animated on a tour of the kitchen. He peeks into one of three walk-in refrigerators—“ Everything is organized, everything is neat and clean. That’s the only way,” he says. There is a butcher prep station, the garde manger (where cold foods are prepped), the pastry department and a stove where the saucier makes soups and sauces. He’s intent on buying locally: “You can be the best chef in the world, but if you do not have the freshest produce and the best ingredients, it will be no good.” And you certainly can bet that he‘s a stickler for cleanliness in the kitchen: “I want three digits,” he says of posting a 100 percent sanitary rating. “That is very important. Nothing else will do. One hundred percent. It’s not about me, it’s about us. Everybody—all of these people taking care of what is here.” The menus evolve from season to season depending on what’s available from local purveyors. Perhaps a starter of venison ravioli or fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese. Trout is certainly a main-course favorite—one week it might be served almondine with a side of cheese polenta and another grilled with buttermilk and tomato pie. Maisonhaute will dip into his French roots for a Beef Bourguignon made with filet mignon cubes, and a perennial favorite is the braised short ribs. Breakfasts are hearty fare as well; go sweet with selections like blueberry pancakes or sharp with staples like country ham biscuits—or a combination of both. “Sometimes a guest wants to be a risk-taker and try something they’ve never had before,” the chef says. “The next night, something pure and simple. We have options. We are very accommodative. We are here to please our guests. If you do not try your hardest, you do not work here.” Asked if he has a favorite dish, Maisonhaute ponders the question a moment. “No,” he says. “My favorite dish is the next one we’re going to create.”
“You just don’t mess around with tradition.
That’s what I love about this place. I’m very fortunate to have traveled quite a bit in my life, I’ve worked at five-star hotels. But this place feels like home.” Chef Patrick Maisonhaute ESEEOLA
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Thursdays
A Side Note++
The seafood is piled high and artfully displayed on Thursday nights at the Eseeola Lodge—and wait ’til you see the dessert table as well.
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by the sea, by the beautiful sea!
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t began as bit of a ruse, honestly. Eseeola Lodge General Manager John Blackburn wanted in the late1980s to entice weekend visitors to come for an extra night and make it a long weekend. Thus he conceived the idea of a Thursday night seafood buffet. Now it has become a summer institution—Thursday nights in Linville. Guests do, in fact, make plans to arrive on Thursday. Members block their calendars off. Locals from surrounding counties bring their loved ones for anniversaries, birthdays and other special events. “You see the same people come back, year after year,” says executive chef Patrick Maisonhaute, who uses Thursday nights to get out of the kitchen and interact with diners. “A working man wants to bring that special lady to the seafood
buffet. You see that big smile on their face—‘Oh my God, look at that shrimp, that tower of lobster, that fresh crab!’ There is so much excitement in their eyes.” Indeed, there is much to see when the kitchen staff rearranges the bar area between the lodge’s living room and the dining room into a splendorous array of food. There’s an expansive table anchored by an intricate ice sculpture that is covered with cold items—fish, seafood, aspics, pâtés and salads, with extras including duck, quail and pork loin. On any given Thursday night, the buffet will include about 100 pounds of shrimp, 70 pounds of lobster tail and up to 50 pounds of lump crab meat—“The best you can buy,” says sous chef Terry Dale. “We’ll get a little extra crab meat and turn it into crab cakes, some of the best you’ve ever had.” There’s a hot bar with a couple
of seafood entrees, usually a chicken or beef addition, and hot vegetables—including the kitchen’s delicious signature butternut-squash pudding. “We’ve had so many people ask for the butternut-squash pudding recipe over the years, we finally printed it up and tell everyone you can get it at the front desk,” Dale says. And to top it off is the dessert bar with a dozen or so freshly made items from cakes to pies to éclairs. “I’ve traveled the world and been through 26 countries and have never seen anything like this,” says Dale, who grew up in Linville as his dad Burl was head golf pro for 25 years. “I’ve been through seafood buffets all over and have never seen anything close. This became a tradition many years ago, and we love that it still carries on today.”
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Golf
Grandmother Creek crisscrosses the third fairway and Grandfather Mountain looms in the distance.
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Sweet
Success
L
inville Golf Club pro Burl Dale used to keep a jar of wooden golf tees on the counter of the golf shop for members and guests to avail themselves before heading out onto the course. Over time, he noticed a preponderance of tees abandoned on the course and figured that since they were free, golfers were taking a laissez faire approach to picking them up. Dale decided to quit displaying them in a jar—the tees would still be gratis but you would now have to ask for them—and replaced them with sour ball candy. In time the round pieces of orange, red, yellow and green candy became a staple of the Linville Golf experience. “They’ve been here as long as I can remember—at least 45 years,” says Tom Dale, Burl’s son and the pro since 1993. “Once our supplier quit making them and we substituted butterscotch. Within a week we heard from our members. Then we tried peppermint and people weren’t happy, either. Finally, we found a supplier who could get us the sour balls in bulk. “They’re a neat little touch. We meet all the kids in the club because they come through to get candy.” Tradition and consistency are hallmarks of the golf experience at Linville Golf Club—as they should be, as the game has been played in this valley since the late-1800s and on this very layout since 1926. The Linville golf experience has direct ties to the home of golf on the east coast of Scotland, as the original founders of the town and club were of Scottish descent, had played the game at St. Andrews and believed it had a future in the United States. The eventual architect of the course, Donald Ross, was a native of Dornoch, a village in the northern
Linville Golf Club
Highlands. Those ties meld nicely with a community that hosts the Highland Games and Gathering of the Scottish Clans each July, features a restaurant named The Tartan and loves the skirls of the bagpipes that waft over the grounds on special occasions. “Other places, no matter what age they are, are trying to create history,” Dale says. “That happens on its own. You can’t manufacture it. You just end up with it if you’ve been around long enough.” Dale’s office on the ground floor of the clubhouse attests to the longevity of the club and the resort that includes the venerable Eseeola Lodge next door. Hanging on one wall is a large drawing from 1924 showing Ross’s original routing. It’s laminated on a piece of plywood, and on the back side is what appears to be an entry sign for an old indoor golf facility run by the founding MacRae family with an image of a golfer resembling Walter Hagen. Dale has photos of steam engines from the day of the Tweetsie Railroad, which provided a key access service to the area before the development of the roads and automobiles. Another photo is from an early Carolinas Golf Association tournament; the CGA held competitions at Linville from the early 1900s, and CGA executive secretary Richard Tufts remarked to prospective entrants before the 1942 Carolinas Amateur: “Spend the week and make a real vacation of the tournament. You need the rest and there is no better place than Linville to take it.” “Linville is one of the best playing golf courses in the mountains,” says golf architect Bobby Weed, who’s consulted with the club on design tweaks since the mid-1990s. “It’s so playable, no hole is forced. It’s a wonderful piece of property. We’ve just tried to embellish that.”
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“Playing at Linville was always a thrill,” famed amateur Billy Joe Patton once said. “It’s a great course, one of my all-time favorites. Like all Ross designs, it’s a fine test; a wonderful, classic course that everyone can enjoy and appreciate.” Donald MacRae Sr. and Samuel Kelsey were the visionaries in the late-1800s who believed an attractive settlement could be launched in the Linville Valley at the base of Grandfather Mountain. They formed the Linville Land, Manufacturing and Mining Company in 1888 and spent $22,000 to build the Eseeola Inn, which opened amid the fanfare of bagpipe music and oxen races during a lavish grand opening on July 4, 1892.
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Hugh and Donald Jr. were MacRae’s two sons, and both knew and understood golf from their visits to the family’s homeland across the Atlantic. Both saw the game having a bright future in America. Hugh talked with friends in Wilmington, where the family lived, about forming Cape Fear Golf Club in the winter of 1895-96 and told them golf was already being played in Linville. Letters from his wife, Rena, who was spending summers in Linville, indicated golf was certainly being played by the summer of 1897. Details of the pre-1900 golf course are sketchy. Apparently there was a nine-hole layout, and in 1900 Donald Jr. personally supervised and paid for construction of five new holes that gave Linville a 14-hole course—with four holes
played twice, from different tees, to constitute an 18-hole round. The layout was by some accounts somewhat fluid to accommodate new homes in the village. One cottage resident complained about balls breaking her bedroom window. This stood as the Linville Golf Club until Ross came in 1924 and designed a new 18-hole course that was built over two years, opening in 1926. Wilmington native Isaac Grainger, a leading official in the Rules of Golf and USGA president in 1954-55, remembered his first trip from the coast to Linville in the early 1900s. “By train from Wilmington to Goldsboro to Hickory to Lenior and Edgemont, twenty-four hours, and then a six or
The sentiments of longtime Linville resident Katharine Blackford sum up the view from behind the fifteenth tee of the golf course.
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Golf
seven hour drive by horse and buggy over the mountains at night,” he said. “That began a long series of exciting sojourns in the delightful spot which is synonymous with the name MacRae.” The course is essentially as Ross designed it. Some changes were made in 1964-65, most notably the extension of the fourth hole from a par-four to a par-five with a new green built closer to the banks of Lake Kawana. The steep hillside in the center of the 17th fairway that had flung balls into the left rough was softened. Weed came on board in the mid-1990s when club president Alan Dickson wanted a consultant to help the club navigate the changing standards of golf equipment
Course Superintendent George Cooke fashioned tee markers from sections of locust limbs, sliced at an angle and painted on the ends to designate the various sets of tees—shown here on the 18th hole looking toward the clubhouse.
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and agronomy—holes were becoming shorter and shorter with the advent of hot balls and metal-headed clubs, and improvements had made been in chemicals and equipment to maintain courses. Dickson instructed Weed at the beginning to learn the club and its members for one year. “He said, ‘Come up, play the golf course, get to know our members and our people,’” Weed remembers. “He said, ‘You need to understand our culture before you do any work.’ I have never had a client come anywhere near doing that.” Over more than a dozen years, Weed has supervised the construction of new tees to lengthen the course to 6,939 yards. The irrigation and drainage systems and all the bunkers have been rebuilt. The maintenance staff has touched up the bridges and wood siding and rebuilt some of the rock walls on the third hole and other places. One of Linville’s charms has always been the somewhat lumpy look of the fairways, the result of the remnants of old tree stumps decomposing over decades. A challenge in rebuilding the fairway of the third hole after the rock walls were rebuilt was to give it, as Weed says, a “mottled and crinkled look. It’s hard to replicate the look of
those pock marks and humps. They’re so natural.” Ross built courses that “looked simple but played hard,” observed Burl Dale, and one of the reasons is there are no heroic forced carries, and mishit shots to the greens don’t mean a double-bogey—but it’s not necessarily easy to recover for a par. “The best part of this golf course is the greens are open in front, you can play any game you like, through the air, on the ground, sometimes both,” Tom Dale says. “Those are attributes that make it hard for good players and easy for poor players. I love that. The high-handicapper misses five feet short of the green, takes a putter or hybrid and knocks it up five feet. The low-handicap player takes five clubs with him and faces all these options: ‘Do it pitch it up? Is the grain against me? Do I spin it? Lob wedge, maybe?’ He never gets comfortable. The other player just rolls it up and moves on.” The putting surfaces at Linville are modest by modern standards (averaging under 5,000 square feet), and the poa annua grass tends to get slicker as the year goes on, putting at 8-9 on the Stimpmeter in the spring and as fast as 12-13 in the fall. The grass goes dormant on cool nights in the fall.
“The greens are the course’s strength,” says Logan Jackson, a seven-time club champion. “You have all kinds of difficulty getting it up and down. It’s not tight, it’s not long, but the challenge is in the greens. “The longer I’ve been there the more I appreciate it. It’s as challenging as any good player would want in a course, but it’s enjoyable for ladies and seniors. It’s playable for everyone.” Tom Dale takes pride that Linville is consistently ranked in Golfweek magazine’s Top Classic Courses. The course is not and never well be from the same cut of cloth as those conceived in recent years with mammoth budgets and every earth-moving gadget known to man. “Bandon Dunes is a wonderful place, but it’s a different animal,” Dale says. “I’m happy if we’re compared to Aronomink, to Winged Foot, to other classic courses. Compare apples to apples. That’s our niche and we stand up very well within it.” With Donald Ross, the mountains and sour-ball candy, that’s not going to change anytime soon.
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Golf++
A Side Note++
Details it’s all in the
A trip around Linville Golf Club is replete with interesting little accouterments and details, the likes of which you don’t find often. A half dozen of the most intriguing are these:
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Rumpled fairways
Because the land was cleared and scraped with primitive implements and animal labor nine decades ago under the direction of architect Donald Ross, the surfaces are hardly svelte and smooth—just like they’re not at St. Andrews. The bumps and knobs and dips appearing in random fashion through the course are one of its charms.
Wooden flagsticks and bunker rakes
Golf pro Tom Dale is all about tradition—he’s been at the club for 25 years, his dad Burl for 25 before that. Thus he sources out the course’s flagsticks and bunker rakes to a custom mill that makes striking and elegant implements. The flagsticks are fashioned from hardwood, sealed and beveled, and the large round tongs on the rakes rip through sand seamlessly.
Sand itself
Grandmother Creek
Donald Ross tee markers
Seafood salad sandwiches
The bright particles that glisten in the sun and set the bunkers in a nice contrast to the emerald fairways come from a manufacturer in nearby Spruce Pine. In the early 1970s, the owner of a Spruce Pine gravel factory named Claude Green figured out that the quartz byproduct from his operation, useless for much else, would make ideal bunker sand, and today it’s used at Linville, nearby Grandfather G&CC and even Augusta National.
The original course had three sets of tees—championship, men’s and ladies. Architect Bobby Weed consulted with the club beginning in the mid-1990s to lengthen holes where possible and got the new championship tee yardage to 6,939 yards. The club wanted to preserve the original course, so stone markers with Ross’s likeness were created and placed roughly where the white tees sit today at just over 6,300 yards.
Grandfather Mountain looms above all in Linville at 5,964 feet, and one of the many streams with its headwaters in the forests beneath the mountain is Grandmother Creek, which runs through the Eseeola Lodge property and golf course toward the Linville River, a mile south. The golf course plays alongside or over the creek and its adjunct, Lake Kawana, on 13 holes.
The halfway house at Linville blends in coherently with the architecture of the lodge and club and is a welcome respite after negotiating the downhill par-three ninth hole. Fridays are good culinary days. You can get a seafood salad sandwich, made from leftovers from Thursday night’s seafood buffet. And one of the club’s signature almond macaroons tops off the tank perfectly for the uphill 10th hole.
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Nature
Catch A good
lan Burchell was captivated as a young boy in Eden, N.C., by the sport of fishing, remembering in “vivid detail” catching his first bream with an uncle as a five-year-old. Years later, he graduated to fly fishing while attending nearby Appalachian State University. “I love everything about fly fishing, the cast, the presentation of the fly, all of the entomology, learning the habits of trout, how to present a fly to them so they can eat it,” he says. “The cast itself is an art. It’s cerebral fishing.” Burchell was also smitten during the summer of 1995 with the aesthetics and personality of the Eseeola Lodge,
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where he worked as an assistant tennis pro before going into the homebuilding business. “I learned that summer this is a special place,” he says. “It’s a gem. But at the time I never dreamed I’d end up back here.” But that’s exactly what Burchell did—combine his love of fishing with the singular personality of the Eseeola Lodge and its recreational accouterments. Burchell was hired by Eseeola General Manager John Blackburn in the spring of 2011 in a newly created outdoor programs director post, leaving a 15-year career building homes in the Linville, Blowing Rock and Boone areas. The lodge’s outdoor program popularity has grown from Burchell running
Alan Burchell revels in the fly-fishing experience along the 5.5 miles of private river available to members and guests of the Eseeola Lodge. “It’s cerebral fishing,” he says.
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Nature
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just under 50 fishing tours the first year to more than 120 in 2016. By mid-February of 2017, the month of May was well along toward being filled with guided fishing and hiking trips. “It was divine intervention,” he says. “Serendipity. I don’t know what to call it. John Blackburn was looking to start a new program, and I needed a change from the homebuilding business. We found each other.” The Eseeola Lodge and Linville Golf Club have a loyal clientele, with homes and memberships passing from one generation to the next. But after the 2008-09 recession, Blackburn was looking to find new niches for the leisure travel dollar. He surveyed the riches that nature had bestowed on Linville and believed that outdoor pursuits weren’t being leveraged with as much energy as they should have—at the Eseeola and at most other mountain resorts, for that matter. “Alan just happened to walk into my office at the perfect time,” Blackburn says. “I bit. It’s been good. He’s brought us lodge guests and club members. Kids like him, older folks feel comfortable around him. We’ll continue to grow the outdoor program. We’re always looking to engage teenagers and children, that’s how you build a long-term, viable resort. We’ll expand our summer camps for teens, things like paddle boarding and flyfishing lessons. We are just in the beginning phases.” Burchell works six days a week, often dawn to dusk, from the lodge’s opening in early May through its closing the third week in October, and operates out of a shop adjacent to the resort’s tennis courts from which he sells outdoors attire, fishing rods and paraphernalia and rents paddleboards and canoes. He’ll take one or two guests on fly fishing trips, teaching them if they’re beginners or want to hone their skills (it’s $195 for two anglers for half a day). He’ll take them to the resort’s target shooting site and hopes one day to add to the resort’s sporting clays facility. He’ll take guests on four-hour hikes that roam into the Wilson Creek trails in the Pisgah National Forest, most of them with splendorous long-range views of the mountains and a few with easy access to wild huckleberry bushes. During the winter, Burchell gets family time and travels to fly-fishing and outdoors shows to promote the program. “A lot people know we’ve got a great Donald Ross
golf course,” he says. “They don’t know we have 5.5 miles of private river and a covered 5-stand where we can shoot sporting clays.” Burchell loves teaching and delights in taking a beginner to the cool waters of the Linville River on a summer afternoon. He’s particularly excited for the 2017 season because of the improvements and refurbishments done the previous year to about one-fifth of resort’s river access, most notably removing a pond area where water stagnated and warmed and affected the temperature and trout health all along that stretch. “It’s exactly like cleaning a paint brush, shaking the water off your brush,” he says, standing in the crystalline waters and mimicking a quick forward whisking motion with his right forearm. “You accelerate to a stop. Nice and slow, elbow high, pause at the end of your lift—that’s very important—then accelerate to a stop. Feel the lever do all the work.” He remembers his trip to the Joan Wulff School of Fly Fishing— the Harvard Business School for anglers—six years ago to learn to teach a sport he’s loved for decades; he grouses about the insanity of teaching fly fishing in a classroom, which, he says, is too often the norm: “This is really a perfect venue, it’s a very relaxing environment,” he says. “Beginning anglers are the most fun, they have not developed bad habits. The difficult student is the guy who has been fishing 20 or 30 years and has developed some bad habits, but he doesn’t know it. It’s a lot like golf in that respect.” Burchell reflects on an earlier life building milliondollar homes and a serendipitous path that led to this post to the Eseeola. “It’s a cliché, but if you’re happy in your job, you never have to work a day in your life,” he says. “I don’t feel like this is too much of a job. It’s not a bad place to work every day. It’s what I’d be doing on my day off anyway. What a great way to spend a couple of hours. Time flies when you wade into the river.” Eseeola guest Lee Cochran shows off her catch in the Linville River, which has been a draw for many years but recently has been restocked and set aside for members and guests.
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A Side Note++
View
room with a
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There’s nothing like a good hike around Linville to work up an appetite for the Eseeola Lodge’s bountiful dining room. And there’s nothing like a good hike the next day to burn off some of the delectable calories consumed the night before. It’s a wonderful virtuous cycle at Linville.
t
wo of the more modest hikes available on the property are the George’s Rock and View Rock trails—short walks with only modest inclines. Want a little more challenge over half a day? Try Big Lost Cove Cliff Trail and the Gragg Prong Falls Trail. Both are routed along or over Wilson Creek, which has its headwaters up Grandfather Mountain. Big Lost Cove Cliff ascends moderately through mixed
hardwoods and then runs along the crest of a ridge on an old logging road. The peak offers a fantastic view of Grandfather Mountain, and as a bonus there are wild huckleberry bushes for a snack. Gragg Prong Falls, known among members as Lost Cove, crosses Wilson Creek three times and skirts some dramatic waterfalls. There’s a nice natural swimming hole below Gragg Prong Falls and room
to hang out, have a picnic and get some sun on the bedrock surrounding the pool. “Both hikes will take three and a half to four hours,” says Alan Burchell. “We can give you a map or guide you ourselves. The Big Lost Cove Cliff has the best views. Gragg Prong Falls is most popular with kids because they can go swimming. Either one is a lot of fun and a great experience.”
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A Side Note++
The low down on the
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High Country
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he only access to Linville more than a century ago was via horse and buggy over dirt roads or by train from Johnson City, Tenn. The train operated by the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad was called “Tweetsie” because the folks who lived along the line from Johnson City to the iron mines in Cranberry, N.C., identified it with the “tweet tweet” of the train’s whistle. From Cranberry the railroad became known as the Linville River Railway and ran through Newland, Pineola, Linville, Foscoe and on north to Boone, the latter part of the route over what would later become Hwy. 105. “You will search the world over for a country of greater natural beauty and for a more delightful and invigorating summer climate than that of the mountain resort region along this railway,” said a 1920 travel brochure. “These lines, popularly known as ‘The Narrow Gauge,’ represent one of the most difficult engineering feats to be found in Eastern America.” The railroad was abandoned after a major flood in 1940, but that elixir of cool breezes and invigorating outdoor activity remains a draw. This area of northwestern North Carolina known as “The High Country” includes Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Watauga and Wilkes counties, and the Eseeola Lodge is convenient to all of it. “It is doubtful if any resort in all the world has a more enthusiastic patronage than that which makes its annual pilgrimage to the attractive village of Linville, in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain,” noted the brochure published by the ET&WNC Railroad.
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A Side Note++
“We’ve got the most beautiful mountain around, and if we keep it the way God made it, we’ll be around long after the others are gone.” Hugh Morton
The Tweetsie Railroad was abandoned after a major flood in 1940, but visitors to the High Country can still ride the train at the Tweetsie theme park in Blowing Rock. Photo credit: Kenneth Riddle Collection of Cy Crumley Photographs, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN.
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One direct link from today and those early train-riding times is the Old Hampton General Store, located half a mile to the west of the Eseeola off Hwy. 221. This 1920 building was an original train stop for the Linville River Railway. Here guests would debark, load up on supplies and take a wagon to the Eseeola or their homes around the golf course. “We’ve got fourth generations coming into the store today,” says owner Abigail Sheets, who bought the store with husband Steve in 2013. “We talk to people whose great-grandparents came through here, back in the day of dirt roads and screen doors and people escaping the heat in wagons and carriages and trains.”
The Sheets opened 87 Ruffin Street Folk Art Gallery in 1999 next door to the Old Hampton and quickly drew a loyal following of locals and travelers to its eclectic mix of paintings, ceramics, carvings, pottery and salvage art. They bought the General Store 14 years later and now their little campus of adjacent buildings has a BBQ restaurant, cocktail bar, bluegrass stage, picnic tables and shelves stocked with favorites such as stone-ground grits, corn meal and local honey. “It’s a laid-back, comfortable place,” says Abigail. “We have three country clubs in Linville and draw from them when people want to get off-property. We have hikers from the Appalachian Trail and motorists from the Blue Ridge Parkway come by. We’re dogfriendly, and lots of times hikers will arrange to meet here after a hike, have a beer and hang out around the picnic tables.” One of the magnets is the store’s smoked BBQ pork, turkey and chicken served on sourdough rolls, custom-baked at a local bakery to the specifics of an old recipe. The preferred side dish is collards (braised in chicken stock and seasoned with bacon), cornbread and dessert of blackberry cobbler or banana pudding. Sheets arrived one morning in February 2017 to find five cars of visitors from Florida lining up for lunch—only to discover the General Store closes during the dead of winter. “They wanted BBQ on sour dough rolls,” she says. “I hated to disappoint them. We have a loyal following. They’ll be back.” Fifteen miles to the north in the town of Valle Crucis is another venerable retail establishment, the Mast General Store. Its genesis was the Taylor General Store,
which opened in 1883 before joining forces with the W.W. Mast family four years later. The owners tried to carry everything their community needed—from plow points to cloth, from cradles to caskets. “If you can’t buy it here,” the owners said, “you don’t need it.” The Mast General Store was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970s as one of the finest remaining examples of an old country general store. Today you can shop for comfortable flannel shirts, castiron frying pans, home decor and enjoy one of the true pleasures of the store—filling up a basket with vintage candy from Pixy Stix to Bit O’Honey to Bazooka bubble gum. The Eseeola Lodge has direct ties to the area’s most famous tourist attraction, the Mile-High Swinging Bridge at Grandfather Mountain. The lodge, golf club and
the Grandfather property nearby were once owned by the MacRae family of Wilmington, and the MacRaes and their descendants have been vigilant stewards of the area’s pristine natural beauty. Leading the way was Hugh Morton, who inherited the Grandfather property in 1952 and built a road to the top and a suspension bridge that stood one mile above sea level.The bridge stretches 228 feet across an 80-foot chasm, and its planks and cables move with the wind. An estimated quarter of a million visitors come to Grandfather every year, and notables from Johnny Cash to Billy Graham, from Mickey Mantle to Tom Hanks have crossed the bridge. “We’ve got the most beautiful mountain around, and if we keep it the way God made it, we’ll be around long after the others are gone,” said Morton.
The Old Hampton Store is part restaurant, part general store, part music pavilion—and it draws patrons from nearby country clubs and off the Blue Ridge Parkway.
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PRSRT STD U.S. POSTAGE PAID PPCO 175 Linville Avenue, Post Office Box 99 Linville, North Carolina 28646 www.eseeola.com • 800.742.6717
“You can’t manufacture history. You just end up with it if you’ve been around long enough.” 32
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– Linville Golf Pro Tom Dale