Pinehurstâs proposed budget for the upcoming year forecasts a continued rebound from the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This time last year, village leaders budgeted cautiously as they waited the economic fallout to everything from sales tax collections to facility rentals. What happened as the pandemic has played out through 2020 and into 2021 has been a mixed bag as far as effects on Pinehurstâs revenues streams go.
Part of the 1.5-cent tax property increase proposed for the 2022 fiscal year is a holdover from last year, when the Village Council decided to delay a half-cent increase so as not to compound unforeseen effects the pandemic might have on Pinehurst residents. The other penny worth of increase, which will bring in an estimated $381,000 in revenue, will support the villageâs acquisition of Given Memorial Library and the Tufts Archives.
photo: courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst, NC
Annie Oakley and her birddog, Dave, who would sniff out money from Pinehurst exhibition spectators to be donated to the Red Cross.
“There’s a famous lady who lived here and her name was Phoebe Moses,” Marva Kirk says on her Pinehurst, North Carolina, history tours. “Have you ever heard of her?” More often than not, the answer is “no,” but when Kirk tells the visitors that Moses’s stage name was Annie Oakley, the world-famous sharpshooter, eyes inevitably brighten with recognition. “Most people are surprised she lived here,” Kirk says.
Pinehurst may now be known as the “Home of American Golf,” but when the affluent Boston businessman James Walker Tufts purchased the land to found the village in 1895, golf was little more than an afterthought. People instead originally came to Pinehurst for shooting and hunting sports, lured as well by the tranquility to be found among the longleaf pines and the temperate