I've been doing research on Barton for a couple of years, and I can fill in a little more of his background. He was born in Newport, N.H., in 1875, and attended Harvard and the University of Chicago before completing his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth in 1904, at the age of 29. By that time he was married (to the first of his three wives, all of whom died while married to Barton) and had already been hired as a mathematics instructor by the college, the only undergrad ever to serve on the Dartmouth faculty.
He taught math there until 1912, when he left to become dean of civil engineering at the University of New Mexico. In 1913 he became math professor at Lombard College, and in 1914 he was dean and acting president at Lombard. He moved to the University of Minnesota in 1916, just at the time a group of U. of M. professors and administrators were establishing a 9-hole golf course at Larpenteur and Cleveland Avenues in St. Paul. Barton became a prominent member of the group, partly because of his experience working on the grounds crew at Hanover Country Club while a Dartmouth student. When the University group lost the lease on their 9-hole course, they found a nearby farm on which to build a new 18-hole course and form a private club. They ended up calling their club Midland Hills, and Barton headed the committee that hired Seth Raynor to design their course (they wanted Ross, who rebuffed frequent requests by Midland Hills to take the job; Raynor was building Somerset C.C. in nearby Mendota Heights, so Midland "settled" for Raynor.)
Barton was put in charge of organizing the work crews to build Raynor's design at Midland Hills, and did such a good job that Raynor hired him as a fulltime associate. Barton hesitated a bit before leaving the teaching field; he offered to stay and see the Midland Hills course through to completion if the club would match Raynor's salary offer, but the club declined. Barton almost immediately went to work on Mid Ocean with Raynor, and then Yale.
Barton's writing demonstrates him to be a proud, creative and thoughtful man; how much he really contributed to Mid Ocean and Yale is something we'll never know, but to the end of his days he insisted he didn't get the credit for those courses that he rightfully deserved. I never got the chance to ask George Bahto about Barton's claims, and though I'm pretty sure I know what George would have said, I'd have enjoyed the conversation.
The Barton design that interests me the most now is his 9-hole course at Hanover Country Club, opened in 1932. It was closed in 1970, the year I arrived in Hanover, because of highway construction, but remained in use as a practice course. I never used it at the time, and had no inkling of who Barton was, but last year I walked the remaining five holes on the east side of Lyme Road, and found what looked to be some very good design elements, particularly a couple of greens benched into hillsides. Jack Nicklaus is said to have called it the finest practice facility he'd ever seen, and I was told that Tom Doak once spent a good amount of time admiring those old holes (I hope Tom might confirm or deny that here.) Ron Prichard was eventually hired to renovate the original 18 holes at HCC; he would have liked to have used some of Barton's nine-hole course, but the college would have insisted on a tunnel or a bridge over Lyme Road, and there wasn't enough money to do that.
Barton donated his work on HCC's 9-hole course to the college. The course was highly regarded at the time, but his luck was never very good. By 1932 the bottom was dropping out of the golf course architecture business; he spent the last years of his life working for the New Hampshire Highway Department. I suspect a potentially great career was lost.