"TEPaul,
Would J.P. Morgan be the other half ?
A.J. Drexel, a distant relative of yours, was a force in finance and on Wall Street."
Patrick:
Sure J.P. Morgan would be. He was considered to be the biggest and most influential financier in American history but he was by no means the only one financing that massive railroad expansion accross America. There were a number of them.
It was an interesting time in finance and construction in a nation-building mode. Those guys like Drexel and Morgan (actually Morgan's early career was first with Drexel & Co and then with a company called Drexel, Morgan, and eventually J.P. Morgan & Co after A.J. Drexel died).
Those guys were raising the money for those railroads but most of the people running them were a bunch of economic cowboys who could and did drive those financiers nuts! After all they were the ones raising the money and putting their reputations on the line with it.
The fact is A.J. Drexel of Philadelphia made Morgan or it's more accurate to say he saved him, then remade him and Drexel during his life was the only man in the world that J.P. Morgan answered to. There's an interesting little book out by one of Morgan's biographers called "A.J. Drexel, the Man Who Made Wall Street."
Part of the reason for that is Drexel took Morgan into his company at the behest of Morgan's father Junius P. Morgan, an American financier in London, and Drexel made young Morgan his man in New York. But there wasn't that much in New York at that time so Drexel built 23 Wall Street, that magnificent wedge-shaped building and that essentially put Wall Street on the map bigtime! 23 Wall Street was intended to be a major statement and it definitely was.
A lot of Morgan's reputation was first made by an incident in the 1880s. Those guys dealt in what were called "Call loans" and apparently at a card game one night Morgan sensed that J. Cooke (a guy Drexel also made) who dealt in financier backed loans to the government was going down and Morgan told Drexel the company needed to call everything in.
The only problem was Drexel was essentially a family company and A.J's brother, Francis, basically ran the call loans in New York. Francis didn't want to do it so A.J. had to decide to go with the advice of Morgan, an outsider, or his brother. A.J went with Morgan and the company got out of harm's way as the huge economic crash of the 1880s set in.
What Drexel did, according to that biography was to also essentially end neopotism in companies like that and go with merit alone.
That event made Morgan and the rest is American economic history of a tall order. J.P Morgan became the biggest name in finance in the world and that's just the way the publicity shy A.J. Drexel wanted it.
But what those guys did for railroad expansion was huge and what railroad expansion did for golf in America was huge too.
As far as golf architecture taking the idea of building up architectural features like railway construction did tracks, I don't really buy that analogy or tie in. But if there was any of that a guy who may've carried it from railroad track construction into golf course architecture might logically be someone like Flynn's Howard Toomey.
The fact is before Toomey got into golf course architecture he was a railroad construction engineer.