Dan,
Well, the original thread premise was interesting, but talk about clogging up your own thread! Patrick got side tracked (and still is, asking me if Tillie was a liar when he described the property) on the train window story vs the hunting. I think its 50-50 (maybe the new hit movie is about this thread?) on how he discovered it, but the clog comes from Patrick doggegly throwing what ever against the wall. Even the photos above show that at least some of the land was srubby, and some was deep woods, but some black and white thinkers think it had to be all or nothing, based on some writings, rather than using their own eyes!
Who can forget Patrick proclaiming that PV wasn't even on this rail line, but really a small branch line? Pat was wrong about that and a lot of other things, too.
I appreciate the intellectual brain power that has gone into analyzing one photo, but I am satisfied that Patrick is WRONG in thinking it was taken from 6 tee looking at 2 Green. That angle would be virtually paralell to the road and tracks seen in the right of the photo and NO WAY would the tracks be visible from that angle. If Patrick would just, for once, admit he is wrong, we might be able to have a productive discussion.
As to what that photo MIGHT tell us about the history of the design and construction of PV, all I can see is if the sandy road was a precursor to the housing road, which might tell us when housing was considered, or if it was just a haul road for construction.
Mike,
I have mentioned that commuter railroads in the early 1900's often built lakes and parks as an attraction to haul customers to. If you look at the photo above, you can see a few structures at the dam of the lake across the tracks, and a growing over path from the station to that location. Its possible this was one of those parks, and there are clearly some houses or farms around there, so maybe it was a "flag stop" for people who lived in that area. Or, just to drop workers off at the mine.
I hadn't considered that the mining in the EPA study might have been done by Crump, but in reality, even commerical mining was a smaller operation than shown in your photo earlier in this thread. I suspect it was the mining company, and that they simply found the sand contaminated, hard to reach, or otherwise not as suitable as other sites in the area. It would be interesting to know the real story on that and the station to further our knowledge of how PV came to be.