Its official: Yale #18 is no longer controversial

[Mark Bourgeois]

It's a whopper.

JMorgan has highlighted the issues; here's how I understand them:
*No topsoil.  The site was tree mulch over rock, so a soil base needed to be created.
*Clearing. Much heavier sledding than anticipated. It had all the "worst" elements of a site that needed to be cleared: bogs, rock outcroppings, large hills, to name a few.  A sense of what they were up against was naming the hill on the 7th "Horse Hill." It earned the name by killing one of the work horses.
*Drainage. Very impermeable. Macdonald's niece said he told her the *only* reason he decided to accept the commission was during one of the surveys they discovered a "seam of sand." Without that discovery, things would have turned out very differently.
* Labor. While machines were used, most of the above had to be accomplished with horse, pan, and hand.

Mark

[Phil McDade]

Those building costs are extraordinarily high. Why was Yale that expensive? Even figuring the lake is totally man-made, $450K still sounds over the top.

ANGC was built five years later for less than a quarter of Yale's cost. Behr's budget for Rancho was $200,000 in '29, considered at the time a very expensive course.

Lawsonia Links -- in the middle of rural Wisconsin -- a highly engineered course designed by William Langford (with design parallels to Raynor) that involved lots of earth moving but little to no dynamite that I know of, cost $250,000 to build and opened in 1930.