Wow, I'm glad I went hiking yesterday. I missed all the fog and smoke, much of it green, being thrown up here to hide the obvious.
The 1906 "Stillman Letter" that went out to the Founders had attached the original Agreement which spelled out the land usage and included the real estate plan.
The 1906 "Stillman Letter" stated very clearly that the original plan would be carried out.
I appreciate Sven's position but don't agree for reasons I've spelled out in detail previously. As far as the others arguing that the real estate plan was already dead, consider that Patrick is now arguing that trained eyes like CBM and Whigham wouldn't have seen the Alps hill on 2 to 3 horseback rides around the property. And yes, Patrick, I've seen Sebonack and played it and it's on great land but CBM was restricted by having to use the Shinnecock Inn as his starting and ending points. The rest is just you arguing to argue as is normal so I don't have time to wade through that. Similarly, David would argue with me if I said CBM was a great architect so I'll similarly limit my responses there, as well.
David won't even answer a direct question like "Do you think CBM and/or Whigham would have seen the Alps on one of their first two or three rides around the property looking at landforms for their ideal holes?" because he knows that answering affirmatively, which is the obviously correct answer, throws his oft-repeated interpretation of the timeline in "Scotland's Gift" out on its ear.For those following at home, CBM claimed that the Alps Hill at NGLA is 15 feet higher than the one at Prestwick. I'll share actual dimensions later today.
Similarly, I've also shown that CBM's statements in "Scotland's Gift" are not typed in some form of chronological timeline, but instead he skips at various places down other non-contiguous avenues that are not in chronological order as someone recounting events over 20 years after the fsct is wont to do. Unless you believe he'd be laying out his Alps hole after building his clubhouse after the Shinneock Inn burned to the ground!
I do think that in the end, CBM was really focused on the golf course. Did he sense by December 1906 that he may have to abandon the housing idea, or that the parcel really wasn't conducive to those plans? Maybe. Was his mention in the letter about this not being an "investment" his attempt to cover his bases from a business standpoint if anything differed from the original Agreement to the "as-built"? Possibly.
But it wasn't because he already had the golf course routed and then fit the boundaries of his purchase to those lines. In December of 1906 he had studied the land with Whigham and others for the types of landforms and soils they needed for their ideal course.
In December 1906 they had already found landforms for the Alps, the redan, an Eden, and a Cape from their rides around the property. Things looked encouraging enough that they secured 200 acres that contained those landforms per the original agreement and got to work, much as Max Behr described. And, as Behr stated, at the end there was excess land that was available for other purposes. In 1912 CBM said much the same when he addressed the question of "Surplus Land" in his letter to the Founders.
Anything else here that's been proposed as alternatives is lacking hard evidence and instead we're being asked to use our best guesses based on very biased argumentative, specious alternatives that are being presented here as most likely scenarios. They don't hold up.