In the past couple weeks, I'd been reading some things online and in some Facebook photography group lists about about the town, so on Monday, I decided to hop into the car and check it out as a one-day photo jaunt.
Southern Pines is about 65 miles southwest of my home outside Raleigh. I took a scenic route to get there, and the trip took me nearly an hour and a half. For the return ride, I took an expressway the majority of the way, and I made it back in just over an hour and 10 minutes.
Southern Pines is a charming town aesthetically. I was not surprised to see that its major residential streets just off the downtown merchants' district are lined with pine trees. The merchants' district is populated generously with novelty, crafts, clothing and other specialty shops. Its 2020 population, 15,000+, is about 2,000 fewer than that of neighboring Pinehurst, the county's largest community and the home of renowned Pinehurst Golf Resort, which has hosted several major championships on the professional golf tours.
Oddly, neither of these two communities is the seat of Moore County. That distinction belongs to tiny Carthage, population 2,635 as of 2020, which is more centrally located in the county.
A couple group posts about Southern Pines praised the fact that the downtown area has quite a few farm-to-table restaurants, and during my walk-around, I passed at least a half-dozen or such places. Unfortunately, I didn't stick around long enough to sample any of them; I got a late start on my trip, and in order to ensure I got back to Raleigh before rush hour, I decided to leave early.
Before visiting the town, I did learn that Southern Pines was home at some point to retired Los Angeles Dodgers southpaw Sandy Koufax and C. Carwell Lipton, a member of Easy Company, the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, during World War II. Lipton was a native of Huntingburg, W.Va., but he chose to retire in Southern Pines and is where he died in December 2001, not longer after HBO aired the excellent 10-part series Band of Brothers, which focused on Easy Company's important role in WWII.
I did not find any local tributes to either Koufax or Lipton, but that's not to say there aren't any. I wasn't there long enough to search thoroughly enough.
I did find the Southern Pines brewery's downtown taproom (it has a production facility and another taproom on the north end of town, too; I didn't make it to that facility), and stopped in to sample four brews on tap.
The downtown taproom location has quaint accommodations on Pennsylvania Street that I would learn shortly afterward were formerly occupied by another brew-related business called Southern Pines Growler Company (no relation to the brewery, other than the accommodations). I would describe the indoor seating area in the brewery's downtown site as being on the small side, but there is equal -- if not slightly more -- outdoor seating, including an area that overlooks Pennsylvania Avenue.
The growler company's new site, which appears near the end of the post, is difficult to photograph given that a network of utility wires and cable drape almost its entire front facade. That's how you'll spt it in the photos below.
I also photographed three churches I came across along the way -- Baptist, Presbyterian and Catholic, all within walking distance of the heart of downtown. I usually don't start a town profile post with a photo of a church, but the local Baptist church was so distinguished I decided to lead off with a photo of it at the top of the post.
I would like to have spent more time in Southern Pines as a visitor; my mistake was not leaving Raleigh sooner than I did in the morning to get there.
The montage of photos begins with a slice of a residential area a couple blocks from the merchants' district. You can see four pine trees lined up in a row. As I mentioned above, this is prevalent throughout the neighborhoods near downtown. That's followed by a shot of the Presbyterian church, Brownson, and of its two steeples. It was difficult to get a lot of church shots, much less the two steeples in the same frame, because of the heavy concentration of pine trees in the neighborhoods. Trees also were a problem photographing St. Anthony of Padua, the Catholic church. A couple pictures of it appear near the end of the post.
The building right below the steeple is First Bank, and two photos below it is the post office.
Those pictures are followed by snippets of the merchants' district and the train depot. I was fortunate to be near the depot when a train came through, so a shot of the train is included below. A shot of the downtown park closes the post.
To view a full gallery of images from the shoot, follow the link in this sentence.
