Bryan,
Very cool map, thanks for sharing.
As regards you land mass interpretation, I 'd respectfully disagree. Shinnecock Hills did in fact, "adjoin" to NGLA's purchase, just as CBM said, but it adjoins to the south, not the east. If the writer was looking for major landmarks to the east he'd have to be pretty blind not to see that the property they bought skirted Bulls Head Bay for a mile.
He certainly wasn't imprecise about mentioning that the land of the purchase ran as far east as Shinnecock GC, skirted the railroad tracks to the south (the land CBM bought was over 1/3 mile from those tracks), and had its westernmost poiint "near the inlet between" Good Ground and Shinnecock Station.
I don't see that as a general description at all, and yes, if the writer considered Cold Spring and it's inlet to be part of a larger Peconic Bay to the north than I think that description locates the attempted purchase where I placed it.
I also think it would be very, very odd for CBM not to have considered that land very strongly for the reasons I mentioned previously. He could use the Shinnecock Inn to serve as a clubhouse, have long stretches along the water, etc...
We know accounts said he was looking at "Various Sections" around Peconic Bay and Shinnecock Hills and I'd frankly be shocked to learn that this wasn't one of them.
Back to your map...
Probably Jeff can best tell us if 20 foot elevation changes were good enough for field work, but it certainly does cast some doubt on CBM's claim that it had never been surveyed prior.
Thanks again for sharing.
David,
Please show us precisely what land of the Shinnecock HIlls Golf Course was north of the NGLA southern border in 1906.
I have found no evidence of that whatsoever, so I'm asking you to please show us.
Also, I'm not sure why you insist on hand-typing just snippets from source documents out of context when I've made it all available here. Don't you trust that people here on GCA can read for themselves without your selective interpretations of the evidence?
For instance, you just re-typed the part about CBM deciding shortly after Alvord's purchase that he wanted to buy in the Shinnecock Hills, followed by the sentence that made his offer for land near the canal, all seemingly in the same timeframe.
However, you then neglect to post the next sentence, and paragraph, which ALSO makes the finding of the Sebonac Neck property and the associated agreement by the developer to sell them 205 acres at 20,000 ALSO seem to fall in quick sequential order, as well, when we KNOW that the whole thing took about a year.
So please just make your point about the evidence, or enter new evidence, but please quit pulling evidence out of context and reshaping it for your purposes. Thanks.
The fact is, all we know from this is that CBM determined to build his course somewhere in the Shinnecock Hills a few weeks after Alvord's purchase, which was in late 1905.
We also know CBM went abroad for almost six months in early 1906.
We don't know when he made his offer for the canal prooerty, and we don't know when he subsequently found the land at Sebonac Neck.
We do know that after the company agreed to sell him 205 acres at $200 an acre that "we" went back and studied the contours earnestly to see how the land fit best to the holes they had in mind.
We don't know how long that took, or when it happened.
We know that CBM signed papers formalizing that agreement on December 14th, 1906, at which time he was quoted as saying that he and his committee would spend the next several months determining which holes to reproduce as well as their yardages.
We know that CBM bought more land than he thought he needed for just golf.
That's what we know so far.