I think the context of the Site Committee report is very important...the club and board appointed them some months earlier to find a property and they found one...CBM certainly lends credibility to the purchase and he may have done a great deal more than just say "it looks good to me", but we seem to have no evidence of anything more...surely you can agree with that David and Tom?
Hard evidence is all we're accepting at this stage of the proceedings I presume...
Hard evidence works for me. And while we may not have the letter or know its details, we nonetheless know plenty about it, unless of course we do not believe the Committee. For example, we know that:
According to the Committee, they chose the land based largely on M&W’s views as to what could be done with it.That may be
hard evidence for some to swallow, but it is
hard evidence nonetheless.
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If I've challenged David's essay, it's partly because I come to it with a basic assumption that I think is sensible or at least reasonable enough, i.e. that if Macdonald had done anything as significant as routing the course, we would've heard about it and heard about it a long time ago. Yet of all the related documents from the time not one of them credits Macdonald with something that significant; and a goodly number of them give the credit for Merion's creation to Wilson; and Macdonald moved on to Piping Rock and Yale and Lido and writing about NGLA and never mentioned Merion again.
Peter,
This is a good question and one I have considered and will continue to consider. One thing I disagree with is your assertion that sources of the time give Wilson credit for the routing. I am aware of no such evidence.
I think Bob Crosby has it right when he noted that it is strange that no one really said anything about who routed Merion, and that they seemed to go to great pains to talk around the issue.
The best explanation I have heard was from Tom MacWood, who thinks that it may have been because of Barker’s involvement. If Macdonald was making suggestions and changes off of Barker’s routing, then Macdonald could not have rightfully claimed total credit for the routing. Likewise, Merion could not credit Macdonald either. And Merion could not credit Wilson because he was not even involved when the initial routing was planned. So they talk around the issue, crediting M&W for advising, crediting Wilson and the Committee for laying the course out upon the ground, for building, seeding, finishing it, and altering it. And Barker, who Merion did not hire, is not mentioned at all.
Upon rereading I noticed something from Robert Lesley’s 1914 article introducing “The Merion Courses.” The passage also speaks directly to the issue of what “laying out” a course meant, but in my rush to get it out I forgot to include it in my essay:
Lesley wrote:
”The ground was found adapted for golf and a course was laid out upon it about three years ago by the following committee: Hugh I. Wilson, chairman, R. S. Francis, H. G. Lloyd, R. E. Griscom, and Dr. Hal Toulmin, who had as advisers, Charles B.Macdonald and H. J. Whigham.”The ground was found “adapted” for golf? Maybe we need Rich’s old dictionary, but my understanding of word “adapt” is that it involves something changing to become better suited for a specific purpose or condition. So “ground adapted for golf” would not be raw land, but land that had been made more suited for a golf course. Arguably, Lesley (who chaired the site committee and would become the president of MCC Golf Association) may have been vaguely and indirectly referring to the Barker routing. If nothing else it is yet another instance where Merion seems to talk around the issue.
Also, note how Lesley describes laying out the course. The course was
laid out upon the ground by the construction committee, who had M&W as advisors. This is exactly how I think Wilson and others used the phrase they wrote of laying out the course. And with this meaning, planning a lay out is not synonymous with laying the course out upon the ground.
I hope I'm not being unfair to David's hard work by bringing that basic assumption to the table. And maybe I'm seeing too much forest and missing trees, but I'd like to think that, if so, it might be a healthy corrective to people missing the forest for the trees.
It is a fair assumption but not one that I think should be dispositive. You assume that he did not mention it because he did not design it, but there are other possible explanations that you may not have considered. I suggest one above. Another is simply that Macdonald may have only took credit for the courses when he or Raynor stayed involved until the course was complete. Or may be he did not like the results. Or maybe he liked what he contributed but not what others contributed. I’ve little proof for any of these, but then I don’t think you have proof for your explanation either.
One thing. Macdonald does mention Merion in his article on the Redan, using Merion’s redan as one of his examples. While CBM doesn’t directly tout it, the other American Redans mentioned were Macdonald/Raynor holes, with the exception of a hole at Pine Valley which CBM describes something like: a short hole with the tee high and Redan features in the green. Whigham wrote that Crump followed a few of Macdonald’s suggestions at Pine Valley, so maybe Macdonald thought of the hole at Pine Valley as his idea, too.
David writes: "The Committee did not want to print it, so they gave a cursory treatment. The Committee is generalizing not M&W." Okay, but the question is, what were M&W being specific ABOUT? The Committee says Macdonald's report was "favorable." Has anyone ever heard of specific routing recommendations/plans/designs that could be distilled down to "favourable"?
They were general so as to NOT convey the details, so why would you expect even distilled version of them.
Doesn't that term suggest that Macdonald's detailed and favourable report was basically all about finding the terrain, for the most part, suitable?
I don’t think so. Providing their
views on what could be done with the land cannot be boiled down to them writing “Build a golf course.”