PineStraw Magazine

08/12/2025

From the Sandhills to the shore:

OUT OF THE BLUE Home Beach Days Turning down the volume By Deborah Salomon About this time of year I long for the beach. Not the honky-tonk kind, its teeming boardwalks lined with high-rise hotels. When my children were small, we caravanned with three other families to Cape Cod for two weeks, someti...

08/07/2025

Are you more of a summer or a winter person? Columnist Bill Fields chooses summer every time.

HOMETOWN Home Sweet, Sweet Summer The days of sand and frozen dessert By Bill Fields When categorizing good times growing up by the calendar, I settle on summer as the best season. Sure, the other parts of the year had some positives. In winter, there were the occasional opposite delights of enough....

08/05/2025

Get an in depth history of the largest private employer of Moore County, FirstHealth of the Carolinas Moore Regional Hospital. Today the local healthcare system is top ranking but a century ago, the area barely had a single hospital.

ONE FOR ALL – BY ALL Home One For All – By All The complicated birth of the Moore County Hospital By Bill Case • Photographs from the Tufts Archives Last year, U.S. News and World Report ranked Pinehurst’s FirstHealth of the Carolinas Moore Regional Hospital sixth best in North Carolina. Mon...

08/01/2025

August has arrived and so has our summer reading issue - this year with a special twist.

07/31/2025

Nothing says summer like Hot Dogs! Read about “The Hot Dogs Rule” in the July magazine’s Southwords.

07/30/2025

Story of a House • Pinehurst has become an enclave of castles and cottages, outdoor showers and indoor pools, antiques and art, dog grooming parlors and tech control rooms accommodating generals and musicians, bankers, brewers, judges and surgeons. From this residential potpourri a new genre emerges: the little gem.

A prime example is the cottage tucked into a quiet, lesser known lane on the edge of a newish residential area. Pinehurst estates have garages bigger than its 820 square feet.

This little gem presents an optical illusion: classic furniture in dark woods is scaled for a larger house but sits comfortably uncrowded in small rooms with low ceilings and a patchwork of floorboards that suggest additions after its completion in 1941.

Read more in July 2025 magazines!

07/29/2025

Low country Culture • Food Feature by Rose Shewey

“Lowcountry boil is a culinary tradition I like to show off to trans-Atlantic friends and family that visit us in North Carolina. It’s American food culture few people abroad know exists — and it’s a showstopper. The moment you spread out a stockpot full of seafood, sausages and corn on the dinner table, conversations halt, anticipation rises, and strangers become instant friends digging into this delicious feast.

Surprisingly, though, Lowcountry boil doesn’t go back as far in history as I had expected. In the 1960s, a young chap named Richard Gay joined the South Carolina National Guard, where he cooked for his mates at the Beaufort Armory during weekend drills. On one such occasion, he gathered up chow hall leftovers, threw them in a large pot together with fresh shrimp he had sourced from his father’s seafood company, and began cooking. Once finished, he spread out the meal across the tables of the banquet hall — and the legendary low country boil was born.”

Read more and see full recipe in your July magazine or on our website.

07/22/2025

Art is for Everyone. The walls and halls and nooks and crannies of the home of the Arts Council of Moore County’s will be bursting with art, from ceilings to baseboards starting July 23, when the doors of the Campbell House galleries open for the 45th annual Fine Arts Festival.

Cats and dogs will chase each other across canvases, children will laugh in watercolor, and painted flowers will forever be in bloom.

Hear more about the artists and festival from writer Jenna Biter in this month’s PineStraw!

07/20/2025

This fiction short story is all about memories, family and love in all its forms.

COLD AND CRISP AND SWEET Home Cold and Crisp and Sweet Fiction by Clyde Edgerton Illustration by David Stanley This happened a long time ago. I was seven years old. Aunt Rosa raked off some seeds from the watermelon slice and then sliced the watermelon out of the rind and cut it up, […]

07/18/2025

A local tale of Revolutionary history with murder, survival and derring-do through the Sandhills by Bill Case.

THE ROAD TO THE HOUSE IN THE HORSESHOE Home The Road to the House in the Horseshoe A Revolutionary tale of murder, survival and derring-do through the Sandhills By Bill Case | Photograph by John Gessner The skirmish at Col. Philip Alston’s home had raged for over three hours without any definitive...

07/16/2025

It took Jim Dodson more than half a century to find and follow America’s most fabled lost Colonial road that reportedly brought more than 100,000 European settlers to the Southern wilderness during the 18th century. Then he turned it into a book.

Dodson shares some backstory on writing his latest release, "The Road That Made America."

THE GREAT WAGON ROAD ODYSSEY Home THE GREAT WAGON ROAD ODYSSEY A pilgrimage half a century in the making By Jim Dodson Not long ago, during a breakfast talk in a retirement community about my forthcoming book on the Great Wagon Road, I was asked by a woman, “So, looking back, what would you say [....

07/08/2025

Happy July! Dive into summer with the latest issue out on stands now.