It is always fun to speculate about the possible reasons in a situation like this, but in this case there is no need because someone who was actually there told us what happened. There is no mention of SHGC ever having considered the current location of NGLA, which was pretty rough and remote in comparison to the location chosen by Davis.
From Samuel Parrish, writing in 1923 about events in 1891. NOTE: PARRISH IS MISTAKENLY REFERRING TO WILLIAM DAVIS AS WILLIE DUNN:
. . . [W]e asked the late Charles L. Atterbury, who was about to visit Montreal on a business trip, if he would interview the authorities of the Royal Montreal Golf Club (organized in 1873, the oldest golf club in Canada, and therefore in the western hemisphere), and arrange with them to have their professional come to Southampton and look the ground over. As the result of this interview, the Scotch^Canadian professional, Willie Dunn [William Davis] by name, arrived at Southampton with clubs and balls in the early part of July, 1891, consigned to me.
Immediately upon his arrival we drove out to the Shinnecock Hills, but had proceeded only a few hundred yards beyond the site of the present Art Village, where the brush then was and still is very thick, when Dunn [Davis] turned to me and remarked in a somewhat crestfallen manner that he was sorry that we had been put to so much trouble and expense, but that no golf course could be made on land of that character. We had already turned our faces homeward toward Southampton when I said to Dunn [Davis]: "Well, Dunn [Davis], what do you want?" thinking perhaps that trees or other natural obstacles were needed for the ground, my knowledge of the requirements of a golf course being at that time exceedingly hazy. He then explained that ground capable of being turned into some sort of turf was necessary, whereat my face brightened into a smile, for I knew every section of the 4,000 acres of the Hills, having often ridden over them, riding, bicycling, and lawn tennis having been at that time almost the only active outdoor exercises in our community. I then drove him to a spot in the valley lying between the low hills now occupied by the houses of James C. Parrish and Arthur B. Claflin, the valley then, as now, being composed of a sandy soil comparatively free from brush, and capable of some sort of treatment appropriate for golf at a reasonable outlay of time and money.
[Davis] then teed up a ball (one of the old-fashioned gutta-percha kind) and handed me a driver. By some fortunate dispensation of Providence, I happened to make a drive (all but too frequently failing since of repetition in my thirty-two years of golf), and the ball went sailing over the embankment of the railroad track at what used to be the old seventh hole, while we still played on the south side of the railroad, this then having been the first golf ball ever struck on the Shinnecock Hills.
. . .
____________________________________
Mark, you wrote that there was " a fair amount of draining and filling." I think I recall some reading something somewhere about some of draining and filling around the 13th green area and it looks like there was some bulkhead work around the NLE 14th green. Is this to what you are you referring, or was there more? If so, what? Thanks.