Tom and Mike,
There may well be other facts to come forward, but your stranglehold on the "APPROXIMATE ROAD LOCATION" for width measurement purposes is astounding. I guess there are some inaccuracies of scale on that 11/15/1910 land plan, but the fact that the road drawn clearly says "approximate" should be your clearest clue to not use it to measure the width of that area...You have based your entire argument against the timing of the Francis deal on the width of the "APPROXIMATE ROAD"...how is that possible?
You guys have speculated alot on here about alot of things, so speculate for me why in the world this group of very smart guys would waste 3 acres in a proposed purchase on an area unusable for golf (because it was to narrow)? They wouldn't. theyknew they wanted to put the 15th green and 16th tee up in that corner when they hired the surveyors to draw up the plan for the membership...there is absolutely no other logical sequence of events...
Jim,
Like David, I believe you're trying to have it both ways in your argument.
You state that since it's an "Approximate Location of Road" we therefore have to discount what it actually measures and represents on one hand and then you say that the fact some triangle shaped land exists along the road on that VERY SAME map proves the Francis Swap for 130x190 of land HAD to have happened before that map was drawn..
Yet, that's not what that triangle measures at all...in fact, it's about 95, maybe 100 yards wide and 300 yards long!! That's 73% x 157% of what Francis stated the dimensions were. THAT'S pretty F*cking approximate, don't you think!? It wasn't "3 acres" as drawn on the 1910 Land Plan, and I believe they THOUGHT it was wide enough...after all, you SHOULD be able to fit two parallel holes in that width.
The problem is that they didn't plan it right because (I speculate, admittedly) the quarry down below wouldn't let them get two parallel holes in down there, so they had to widen things at the top.
That's why I tried to provide those aerials a few days ago showing where the real bottleneck occurred because of the need to provide an alternate route on the right side around the quarry on #16 during the days of Hickory shafts.
And honestly, Jim...to state that we have based our entire argument against the Francis Land Swap happening before November on the wdith of that triangle is simply untrue.
What about the other items Tom has brought forward, such as MCC meeting minutes clearly stating that the routing was still being worked on by the Committee the entire period up to April 6th, 1911, or the fact that Merion didn't even purchase the property (through Lloyd) until December 1910, or the fact that the news article I produced today from 11/24/1910 stated that the land had been purchased and now would be "laid out" by Barker, which means it COULD NOT have been routed before then.
I know you're trying to be fair here, Jim, and give David a fair hearing, but I'm not hearing anyone, including David, even address these FACTS.