You know, that's what it really does come down to.  Merion is great.  And I never want to lose sight of this.  It is the course I have the most affection for.  

Merion achieved greatness over a long period of time.  It was this long and devoted process which in fact helped make it great.  A number of people were involved and all deserve our thanks.  

It is just that some of us are a bit nutty about figuring out who did what and when.  But we should not miss the forest for the trees, so to speak  

Pat -
Would you say that Donald Ross advised on the design of Augusta National?

TE
By the way the quote that begins, “It is too early to attempt an analytical criticism of the various holes...." was not written by Tillinghast, it was written by Far & Sure, who I suspect was Travis.

Tom-
Just a quick question: did various writers/architects write articles in American Golfer under pseudonyms, much like those written in the Philadelphia Gazette and Poor Richard's Almananc years earlier by another famous Philadelphian, Benjamin Franklin?  

Thanks

-DRB

 I still think the movement of the tees on the two par threes on the front is a significant change. That is if the greens were not changed.
  I have a question on the famous #11. Was the green moved to the other side of the creek after this date? Wow that is big.

 the pictures shown on this thread re#11,so I guess they moved in 1922

Wayne --

You write that "some of us are a bit nutty about figuring out who did what and when."

I mean this question completely respectfully:

What is to be gained from figuring out who did what and when -- presuming such a thing is possible, in an enterprise you concede was collegial?

Dan

Dan;

As someone who has spent an inordinate amount of my time researching the "who did what" at various courses great and small over the years, I can't even begin to describe the rationale to someone not similarly afflicted.  

Why does it matter that, say John Gehman designed the Butter Valley Golf Port in PA in 1968, or that Willie Tucker designed the first nine holes at Bonneville GC in Utah in 1927?  I don't know, but I dug it up anyway because I was curious.  

Personally, I blame Cornish and Whitten for getting me hooked on this stuff about 15 years ago.  

Mike --

Thanks for the answer.

Is this a proper paraphrase of what you said: "It's got to be the going, not the getting there, that's good"?

-------------

Let me add a question:

How do you know, really, that "John Gehman designed the Butter Valley Golf Port in PA in 1968, or that Willie Tucker designed the first nine holes at Bonneville GC in Utah in 1927?"

You may know that Mr. Gehman and Mr. Tucker were in charge -- but how do you know that all of their best ideas didn't come from some Burbeckian underling? (Seems to me a given, in collegial enterprises, that the officially attributed credits and blames for ideas, good and bad, rarely tell the full, true story...and that the full, true story is rarely recoverable -- even the next year, much less most of a century later.)

Don't you think this Merion investigation might be attempting to reconstruct the unreconstructable?

"the pictures shown on this thread re#11,so I guess they moved in 1922 "

Mike, no need to guess.  I told you  

Tom MacWood:

When did you first come to believe that Merion was trying to imply that Hugh Wilson and committee was more responsible for the design of Merion East than you believe they were? And when did you first come to believe that PVGC has been trying to imply that Crump was more responsible for the design of PVGC than you believe he was?

Tom MacWood:

How much time did Macdonald and Whigam spend at Merion East during it's construction in 1911?

Dan Kelly,

If a golf course had undergone a number of changes over the years, at the hands of others, and wanted to return to its roots, its original architecture, wouldn't it be important to determine who did what to the golf course, and when, such that they could reconstruct and restore the golf course to the original architects features, rather then those of intervening green committees, superintendents and other architects ?

What harm does the knowledge bring with it ?

None. Absolutely none. I certainly was not suggesting that inquiries such as this do any harm.

I was asking what benefit we hope to gain from knowing exactly who did what during the youth and adolescence of Merion.

I asked Tom MacWood:

“Tom MacWood:
How much time did Macdonald and Whigam spend at Merion East during it's construction in 1911?”

Tom MacWood replied;

“I don't know. I'm not sure how much time the individual members of the committee spent on site either.”

Apparently you aren’t. Apparently you’ve never read the report Hugh Wilson wrote about the creation of Merion East at the behest of Charles Piper. It’s a 10 page report written in 1916 but as I mentioned on this thread earlier most of the ten page report is about issues of the early agronomy of the golf course. This part however is indicative of the actual architectural creation of the course between the spring of 1911 and approximately September 1911. The ‘our problem’ and the ‘we’ Wilson mentions is obvious the Merion committee, and those that worked for them, including Pickering, the foreman, Flynn the greenkeeper and Toomey the engineer.

‘”Our problem was to lay out the course, build and seed eighteen greens and fifteen fairways. Three fairways were old pasture turf…..we collected all the information we could from local committees and greenkeepers, and we started in the spring of 1911 to construct the course on ground which had largely been farmland…..After completing construction of the greens, and thoroughly harrowing and breaking up the soil on both fairways and greens, we allowed the weeds to germinate and harrowed them in about every three weeks. We sowed from September first to fifteenth 1911) and made a remarkably good catch due to two things—good weather conditions and thorough preparation of the soil. …..We opened the course September 14, 1912….”

As we can see that architectural work took about six months. We know it was the charge from the club to Wilson and committee to build the golf course so since the course was build in app six months I think we can probably assume all those men mentioned above, either individually or together were there to do it. Certainly they didn’t record which of them did every detail, perhaps they just didn’t understand or think of the importance of doing that but we do have some of the more interesting details recorded such as Richard Francis’s idea of how to solve the problem in the #15 and #16 area that managed to create the famous #16 quarry hole.

As Dan Kelly mentioned in that important question above---(Is it possible to reconstruct the unreconstructable at this point?), but the thing that strikes me as interesting is we definitely do know that Wilson and the Merion Committee were certainly most appreciative towards Macdonald (and Whigam) for their help and advice in 1910 before Wilson traveled to Europe. One would think that if Macdonald and Whigam had come to Philadelphia and offered a real helping hand in both routing and designing the golf course that both Wilson and the Merion Committee certainly would have mentioned it! Our perhaps you really do think at that point between spring 1911 and September 1911 Wilson and the committee had suddenly decided it was time to begin to glorify themselves through the exclusion of others!

For you to virtually overlook or at least seriously minimize what men like Wilson and his committee were doing practically every day during the construction of the course both in that early phase and then Wilson and Flynn in the years to come----as well as what a man such as Crump was doing practically every day for five years at PVGC is one of the primary reasons I think you’re not a very good golf architectural analyst. For some reason you seem to totally miss the obvious and you tend to try to maximize the importance of generalities in newspaper articles about men from New York when you don’t even know if they spent more than a day or two there.

From post #90:

"Dan
That is pretty persuasive, but than again I've never said Macdonald designed Merion, he only advised the committee. TE gets advice confused with design.
I reckon there are more than a few GCA participents who have spent in excess of 7 months playing and studying overseas. If their goal was to construct a golf course, the smart ones would seek the advise of an architect. Wilson was a smart man."

Tom MacWood:

I certainly don't get advice confused with designing but it appears you do. Everyone knows Wilson and the Merion committee got advice on designing from Macdonald. They certainly all went to great lengths to thank him for it too. That was when they spend two days with him at NGLA in 1910 before Wilson sailed for Europe. When Wilson returned it appears from the evidence that's left that he and his committee were ready to route and design and construct Merion East which they did in about six months.

Again, Tom, if they'd been so appreciative towards Macdonald for those two days at NGLA why do you supposed they mentioned nothing much more about his advise when Wilson returned and began to design and build?

Don't bother to answer that because I think I know why you suppose that---you think it was the beginning of this massive decades long campaign on the part of Philadelphians to glorify what they did at the exclusion of others!  

What a joke that is and, again, the reason I think you're a poor golf analyst and even an historical revisionist which is much worse,in my opinion---you just keep trying to make things out of some generalities that just don't have much meaning---in this case the mention in some articles about "advice". The irony is that advice probably is nothing much more than the advice he gave them BEFORE they built the course and even more ironically the advice they were so appreciative of that's so much part of the record of Merion East.