......And C.B. Macdonald and his son-in-law Henry J. Whigam, didn't!
(Or alternatively, The "Philaldephia Syndrome's" bully boys and the "Men of Merion's" response to the "status quo" and "legends" questioning of certain uncivil aliens and outsiders from the "City of Brotherly Love").
After reading the letter from the site committee to the MCC board on July 1, 1910 and including a Barker letter mentioning his sketch on land that the developer Connell chose (100 acres or so) and including MCC's letter to the membership on Nov 15 1910, and Lloyd’s land deal letter about the same time, here's what I think happened:
1. In June 1910 Connell got Barker to do a golf course sketch on land that probably was something like some of what Merion's site looks like now, and Barker sent his sketch and his letter to Connell who gave in to the site committee. This was around the middle of June 1910.
2. The site committee considered it and decided to get another opinion (Macdonald/Whigam). Griscom who knew Macdonald anyway asked him to look at the land that MCC's site committee had been considering at Merion Ardmore among other tracts elsewhere.
3. The US Open was about to be held at The Philadelphia Cricket Club at St. Martins on June 17-19, and Macdonald being on the board of the USGA and one of a few on the USGA Rules Committee probably was in Philadelphia or was going to be for the US Open anyway as Whigam probably was going to be.
4. On July 1, 1910, the site committee sent a report to the board of MCC mentioning Macdonald/Whigam’s visit, and mentioning that Macdonald had written a “LETTER” to a member of the site committee (probably Griscom) about which the site committee’s report said; ‘We can properly say, however, that it was, in general terms, favorable, and the committee based their recommendation largely on their opinion.’ One would almost undeniably have to assume that if Macdonald/Whigam who perhaps visited Merion Ardmore around the US Open for a day or less to look at land for a course MCCs site committee had been “considering” and had supplied them with a routing and course design plan that a future “construction committee” could use simply to build to that they would have said exactly that to the MCC board. But they said nothing like that---they never mentioned a Macdonald routing or design for Merion East. Matter of fact, that has never been suggested anywhere at any time until David Moriarty’s essay “The Missing Faces of Merion” in April, 2008, almost a century after the fact. All they said was Macdonald wrote them a “letter” in which he and Whigam felt that the land the site committee had been considering for a course was ‘in general terms, favorable.’ This is why some of us here and apparently Merion never thought Macdonald/Whigam offered Merion a routing and hole-design plan.
5. From perhaps July until November 1910, the club, through the organization and financial help of Lloyd and some other Merion members, the MCC board described as “guarantors”, parceled together Haverford Development Company (HDC) land holdings with the so-called “Dallas Estate” that totaled app. 117 acres which is most all of what the course is today.
6. In January 1911 MCC appointed the “Construction Committee” with Hugh Wilson as the chairman and Lloyd, Toulmin, Francis and Griscom as his committee members.
7. Wilson and his committee very likely journeyed to NGLA to see Macdonald and Whigam in Jan. 1911 to go over drawings and plans, probably NGLA’s construction plans, AND perhaps the template drawings Macdonald had amassed from abroad in 1906, and then they analyzed NGLA on the ground the following day. Of this visit Hugh Wilson said 4-5 years later in his report on Merion East and West (which by the way was written for Piper and Oakley of the US Dept of Agriculture and was not intended to be about the architecture but about the development of the course’s agronomy). Wilson said in his report in 1915-16; ‘Through sketches and explanations of the right principles of the holes that formed the famous courses abroad and had stood the test of time, we learned what was right and what WE should try to accomplish with OUR NATURAL FEATURES.’
8. Wilson and his committee returned to Merion and on Feb. 1, 1911 Wilson wrote his first letter (afterward known as the “Agronomy Letters”, perhaps 1,500 in the 14 year correspondence) to Piper and Oakley of the US Dept of Agriculture explaining that Macdonald had asked him to contact them for soil analyses that might be accomplished from area soil testing that Piper and Oakly might identify off a contour topo map of the course site that Wilson offered to send them.
(continued)