Duplin Country Club

Kenansville sits at the heart of Duplin County in the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina — tobacco and sweet potato country, where the land runs flat and wide beneath big Carolina skies. This is decidedly small-town golf, the kind of club that exists to serve a community rather than attract a destination crowd, and there's an honest, unpretentious quality to that purpose that many golfers find quietly appealing.

Duplin County Club has the feel of a true local institution, the sort of place where members have been playing the same friendly Saturday morning games for decades and where a stranger is likely to get paired up and welcomed without a second thought. Golf in this part of the state tends to be relaxed and affordable, a world apart from the resort corridors of Pinehurst to the west or the Outer Banks to the east.

The flat coastal plain terrain typical of this region means the course rewards placement and course management over sheer power, with the landscape likely shaped by the pines and hardwoods common to eastern Carolina's rural interior.