I asked Tom MacWood:
“Tom MacWood:
How much time did Macdonald and Whigam spend at Merion East during it's construction in 1911?”
Tom MacWood replied;
“I don't know. I'm not sure how much time the individual members of the committee spent on site either.”
Apparently you aren’t. Apparently you’ve never read the report Hugh Wilson wrote about the creation of Merion East at the behest of Charles Piper. It’s a 10 page report written in 1916 but as I mentioned on this thread earlier most of the ten page report is about issues of the early agronomy of the golf course. This part however is indicative of the actual architectural creation of the course between the spring of 1911 and approximately September 1911. The ‘our problem’ and the ‘we’ Wilson mentions is obvious the Merion committee, and those that worked for them, including Pickering, the foreman, Flynn the greenkeeper and Toomey the engineer.
‘”Our problem was to lay out the course, build and seed eighteen greens and fifteen fairways. Three fairways were old pasture turf…..we collected all the information we could from local committees and greenkeepers, and we started in the spring of 1911 to construct the course on ground which had largely been farmland…..After completing construction of the greens, and thoroughly harrowing and breaking up the soil on both fairways and greens, we allowed the weeds to germinate and harrowed them in about every three weeks. We sowed from September first to fifteenth 1911) and made a remarkably good catch due to two things—good weather conditions and thorough preparation of the soil. …..We opened the course September 14, 1912….”
As we can see that architectural work took about six months. We know it was the charge from the club to Wilson and committee to build the golf course so since the course was build in app six months I think we can probably assume all those men mentioned above, either individually or together were there to do it. Certainly they didn’t record which of them did every detail, perhaps they just didn’t understand or think of the importance of doing that but we do have some of the more interesting details recorded such as Richard Francis’s idea of how to solve the problem in the #15 and #16 area that managed to create the famous #16 quarry hole.
As Dan Kelly mentioned in that important question above---(Is it possible to reconstruct the unreconstructable at this point?), but the thing that strikes me as interesting is we definitely do know that Wilson and the Merion Committee were certainly most appreciative towards Macdonald (and Whigam) for their help and advice in 1910 before Wilson traveled to Europe. One would think that if Macdonald and Whigam had come to Philadelphia and offered a real helping hand in both routing and designing the golf course that both Wilson and the Merion Committee certainly would have mentioned it! Our perhaps you really do think at that point between spring 1911 and September 1911 Wilson and the committee had suddenly decided it was time to begin to glorify themselves through the exclusion of others!
For you to virtually overlook or at least seriously minimize what men like Wilson and his committee were doing practically every day during the construction of the course both in that early phase and then Wilson and Flynn in the years to come----as well as what a man such as Crump was doing practically every day for five years at PVGC is one of the primary reasons I think you’re not a very good golf architectural analyst. For some reason you seem to totally miss the obvious and you tend to try to maximize the importance of generalities in newspaper articles about men from New York when you don’t even know if they spent more than a day or two there.
From post #90:
"Dan
That is pretty persuasive, but than again I've never said Macdonald designed Merion, he only advised the committee. TE gets advice confused with design.
I reckon there are more than a few GCA participents who have spent in excess of 7 months playing and studying overseas. If their goal was to construct a golf course, the smart ones would seek the advise of an architect. Wilson was a smart man."
Tom MacWood:
I certainly don't get advice confused with designing but it appears you do. Everyone knows Wilson and the Merion committee got advice on designing from Macdonald. They certainly all went to great lengths to thank him for it too. That was when they spend two days with him at NGLA in 1910 before Wilson sailed for Europe. When Wilson returned it appears from the evidence that's left that he and his committee were ready to route and design and construct Merion East which they did in about six months.
Again, Tom, if they'd been so appreciative towards Macdonald for those two days at NGLA why do you supposed they mentioned nothing much more about his advise when Wilson returned and began to design and build?
Don't bother to answer that because I think I know why you suppose that---you think it was the beginning of this massive decades long campaign on the part of Philadelphians to glorify what they did at the exclusion of others!
What a joke that is and, again, the reason I think you're a poor golf analyst and even an historical revisionist which is much worse,in my opinion---you just keep trying to make things out of some generalities that just don't have much meaning---in this case the mention in some articles about "advice". The irony is that advice probably is nothing much more than the advice he gave them BEFORE they built the course and even more ironically the advice they were so appreciative of that's so much part of the record of Merion East.