After plenty of research, Sea Pines Company founder Charles Fraser said he discovered that golf was played in South Carolina and Georgia before anywhere else in the country, not in the New York-New Jersey area as some people thought.

Records showed that golf clubs and balls were shipped to Charleston in 1744 from Edinburgh, Scotland.

"It was the birthplace of golf in this country," he contended.

Private golf clubs were formed and eventually a public club, the South Carolina Golf Club, was formed in 1786.

Fraser, knowing the history of golf in the area, was all for having a tournament on Hilton Head Island and particularly in Sea Pines Plantation.

John Gettys Smith, then Sea Pines' vice president for public relations, advertising and community development, said when the plantation's third course -- the Harbour Town Golf Links -- was being built, it was intended to host a golf tournament.

So Smith and Donald O'Quinn, the vice president for golf operations, got together with Sea Pines resident Bill Dyer, who had previously directed smaller golf tournaments, to discuss putting a tournament together.

"We met and said it seems like the right time," Smith said. "We then had a good long meeting with Charles and told him about our conversation. He said, 'Let's do it,' which actually means, 'You do it,' so I did it."

Smith was the tournament chairman for the first five years, while Fraser served as honorary chairman and O'Quinn vice chairman.

In 1969, it wasn't as hard to find a date on the PGA Tour as it is now. Tournament organizers chose Thanksgiving week, patterning it after the traditional Scottish tournaments.

Because none of the organizers had ever run a major tournament before, they needed help. They called upon Charlie Price, a long-time golf writer, to move here from New York and act as a consultant.

"He thought I had lost my mind when I first approached him," Smith said. "He said he had hardly heard of the place. He said he'd be moving to the sticks and the swamps and all that. But we talked and he agreed to come down and he fell in love with the place.

"Because of his reputation -- he probably knew more about golf then anybody -- he served as a consultant and calmed the fears of the volunteers."

At the time, there were only 400 houses in Sea Pines. Harbour Town Golf Links was not even completely finished.

"Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus, who was a consultant, did a masterful job," Smith said of the course. "They finished it just in time.

"I think the only people who played the course before the tournament were Pete, Jack and Gary Player, who came here as a guest. They thought it was fantastic. It was built in about a year."

The Harbour Town lighthouse, which has become the tournament's signature landmark, was not finished in time for the first tournament.

"It was built for no other purpose than to be a landmark," Fraser once said. "We wanted to build something that would be easy to photograph or paint or be seen on TV. We struggled to find a design that would be simple."

"Now it's the symbol for the whole state," he added.

The Thanksgiving date was after the PGA Tour season had ended and at first Fraser wasn't sure who would want to play in a tournament here.

"We had a good field," he said. "Arnold Palmer was coming, although he hadn't won anything in a long time. And Jack Nicklaus, who with Pete Dye co-designed the course, came, so a lot of other players came, too."

When the struggling Palmer started to turn his game around after two days at Harbour Town, the national media descended upon Hilton Head.

"All the sports writers began charging to Hilton Head Island," Fraser said. "Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated was here, the New York Times was here, AP and UPI. Our little press tent was barely able to handle the surge. But there were stories all over the world Monday about Palmer's victory."

Smith said if Palmer had not won the first Heritage, it might not have become a regular spot on the Tour.

"When Palmer was coming down 18 with the lead I was so nervous," Smith recalled. (There) was no star behind him, no one who approached his caliber. I remember standing at the edge of the harbor kicking dirt. Soon after, Charles came out and said, 'Is something wrong?'

"I said, 'Do you have any idea that if he wins what a super story it will be and what will happen if he loses and the winner is not a superstar?'

"He just said, 'Oh,' and wandered away."

"Palmer made a putt to take the first Heritage crown and saved us," Smith said.

After Palmer's win, Smith said Sports Illustrated's Jenkins came back to Hilton Head to do a longer feature story on the new course.

"They called it, 'Nothing less than a work of art,' " Smith said.

From there, the tournament began to grow in popularity. The crowd at the first Heritage was 4,500 -- by design. Smith said they wanted to keep the tournament crowds small so the fans could get better views of the action.

"The first couple of years, it wasn't a problem," Smith said. "People weren't knocking down the door for tickets," mainly because the island's population was so small.

The date was then moved from Thanksgiving to September for one year. Then, the tournament moved to the spring and in 1985 was positioned just after the Masters.

"It was just getting too cold," Fraser said.

But the tournament really began to take off around 1975 when it was televised, Fraser said.

"TV was the key to widespread knowledge of Hilton Head Island," Fraser said. "There was more purse money and the crowds began to grow larger. The local residents did a superb job with it. The players' families loved coming here.

"In fact, Arnold Palmer's wife (Winifred) said, 'If he's not coming here, I am.' "