"As regards the date of Wilson's trip abroad, that was indeed a very valuable find by David which I admittedly didn't believe at first but was later proven wrong when Joe found the Findlay article that made clear it was Wilson;s first trip abroad."
Mike:
For the interest and entertainment of the real golf architecture research buff, there is another bit of material evidence that corroborates the Wilson trip abroad in 1912 that is now part of the Merion archives along with that Findlay article that Joe Bausch found.
There's a pretty interesting backstory to that second item and more than a bit of irony to this entire Merion investigation! It is an April 11 letter to Russell Oakley from guess who?-------Richard Francis of all people, who was obviously standing in for Hugh Wilson as he makes what Francis describes as "a hurried trip abroad."
It is on the George A. Fuller Building Construction Company letterhead and it is signed "Very Truly Yours, Richard Francis, For the MCC Golf Association."
That letter was in the so-called "agronomy files" that are at the USGA Green Section.
When Wayne and I came across those so-called agronomy letters, maybe 5-6 years ago we were told by the USGA Green Section the entire voluminous file had just come in a few months before we walked into the USGA Green Section looking to do research on William Flynn. Apparently they'd been found in the attic of a Mid-Atlantic USGA regional agronomist where they may've been for decades.
Wayne and I spent most of a day in the USGA Green Section scanning through about 2,000 letters in those files basically looking for Flynn's name and any mention of him, and that is what we ended up copying that day and taking home with us. I still have those separate file folders with what we copied that day----maybe a hundred or so letters.
We did not copy that Francis letter to Oakley of April 11, 1912 because it didn't pertain to Flynn.
However, a little over a year ago I went back to the USGA Green Section to go through every single letter from the very first one from Wilson to Oakley (Feb. 1, 1911) up until Wilson's trip abroad just to see if Wilson even had the time opportunity to be abroad before that 1912 trip. Since his letters to Oakley from Philadelphia were on such a constant and regular stream I determined he had not time opportunity to be abroad before that 1912 trip and I said so on here and I also put on here the fact of that April 11, 1912 letter from Francis to Oakley corroborating that Wilson was abroad for some time period between March 1, 1911 and May 20, 1911 (the dates that bracket Hugh Wilson's letters from Philadelphia to Russell Oakley).
Unlike the Findlay article, that Francis letter to Oakley did not mention that the trip abroad that Wilson was on at the time was his first abroad or even why he went over there!