"Mr. Macdonald, who served on the advisory committee, was familiar with the plans from the outset, but Mr. Raynor was the real genius of the masterpiece, who made the layout, designed the greens and gave the work of construction his supervision from start to finish."
--Charles Banks, as quoted in The Evangelist of Golf.
Deepdale, Gibson Island, Shinnecock Hills and most likely some of what was Ocean Links, were Macdonald courses.
If we are going to credit Donald Ross with 400 courses, then CB Mac gets some credit for Yale:
http://research.yale.edu/wwkelly/Yale-golf/Topics/ArchitectPages/Macdonald.htmlBy the anniversary of Adee’s letter, his good friend Charles Macdonald [age 68], who had “renounced having anything to do with building another golf course” [7], had agreed to serve as a consultant, and Seth Raynor had been hired as the architect. A 36-hole plan was drawn, financing for Course No. 1 was arranged, and the Athletic Board of Control authorized the execution of contracts, so that construction could begin.
Macdonald wrote that “the building of it was a difficult engineering problem.”
The land was high, heavily wooded, hilly and no part of it had been cultivated for over forty years. There were no roads or houses upon it. It was a veritable wilderness when given to Yale….When in the timber one could not see fifty feet ahead, the underbrush was so thick. However, we found on the high land wonderful deposits of sea sand, indicating that the sea must have swept the land during the glacial period. In a bog some quarter of a mile long we found deposited some four to six feet of wonderful rich black muck. These two deposits of sand and muck made it possible to build the course. [7]
There is no evidence that C B Macdonald visited the construction site or saw the course after it opened on April 15, 1926. That was the work of Seth Raynor, Charles Banks, Ralph Barton, and Bill Perkins. Macdonald was involved in the design and construction of 15 golf courses from 1893 to 1926. He accepted no fee for any of this work. Significantly, when he wrote his autobiography he chose to write about only four courses, National, Lido, Mid-Ocean and Yale. [1]
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PS. I am pretty sure that Raynor only spent 1 visit at Mountain Lake. How much credit should Olmstead receive?