Jeff,
You ignorant sl*t!
I do have to address one of your points about both Tillinghast and Perrin possibly aggrandizing their respective roles due to the success and plaudits rolling in to Pine Valley.
In the case of Tillinghast, he reported that Crump saw the site for golf from the train in three separate publications in January 1913. At that very early stage, there were no plaudits, except perhaps from other of Crump's close friends, and that was only related to the desirability of the site, not anything that was actually built. It is clear that Crump tapped him to tell/write the story and if anything was amiss in them I'm quite sure Crump would have corrected him and Tillinghast would have respected Crump's wishes....he certainly wouldn't write about it again in 1933 after Crump's death, which is what he did.
In the case of Perrin, he essentially put together the club and if memory serves was the first president. There is no question that he knew of the site by 1912, and no question that he thought Crump hunted there, which he almost certainly did.
This whole ridiculous notion is simply due to the equally ridiculous notion that the two stories are mutually exclusive.
While Patrick trumpets Shelly, Shelly himself tells us the stories are NOT mutually exclusive.
Instead, he says;
"It could be that, in tramping through the grounds, he saw more of the trees and shrubs than the forest, and perhaps only realized the rolling nature of its possibilities when he saw it at a greater distance from the train. In any case, he found a great location for the building of a golf course, no matter how."
Patrick's contentions about the mysteriously missing Train Station, the speed of the train, the size of the trees, etc. have all been effectively rebutted by virtually everyone here. Those arguments, and a misplaying of Shelly's words (including an omission of what I transcribed above) have been his only supposed evidence that the two stories are mutually exclusive.
Tom MacWood outlined his case for the mutual exclusivity which I think Jim Sullivan rebutted quite accurately yesterday.
And, we had the train schedule that David Moriarty produced showing no station effectively answered by SPBD's train schedule showing everything from the Sumner station to the days/times of the runs.
So, unless everyone agrees with Patrick that a multi-hour run between Camden and Atlantic City would somehow mean it was dark at about 8am in Clementon back in the winter of 1910
, I think we'd all be better served to get off this off the rails discussion trained back on discussing the topos, as Tom MacWood has very nicely done in his last post.