"Now, to turn your question around, do the members think they know better than Donald Ross regarding bunker placement?"
MikeC:
Now that's an interesting and very relevent question to ask! And it's one after all I've said to you I certainly should try to answer thoughtfully!
I don't know if they thought they knew better than Ross about bunker placement. What they all know, though, is what they want--and what they want is what interests them the most obviously, in the final analysis. Probably half of the members of Donald Ross's courses never even knew who Ross was and certainly less had any idea about what his ideas on bunker placement was all about anyway.
Certainly an architect like Ross, of all of them, had to know and understand that. I call Ross, perhaps the most "democratic" architect of perhaps all of them. Why do I say that about him? Simply because I feel he discovered his own unique way of figuring out in his architecture how to accomodate a very broad spectrum of golfer capabilities on the same golf course!
And let's be realistic here--obviously that was very important to Ross--he was an early architectural pioneer in America, he was plying territory and opinions on golf and certainly architecture that were virtually unknown if in fact there were many. He wanted to popularize the game here as much as anything not just to stick to long held principles but to make a life for himself and the game he knew and loved.
Mike, just look at what Ross said about probably this very subject of DH bunkers, certainly in a general sense at least and at some point on or before 1914. (Tillinghast said virtually the same thing on or before 1917--that we know of).
Ross said:
"The design of American courses in the early days of golf differed materially from the practices of this age (1914).
Greens were twice as large as they are now and all were square in shape.
Bunkers were square symmetrical cops or hills placed directly across the line of play.
Designers followed the idea of penalizing the poor player. He had to drive into the bunkers or over them.
Today, strategy governs the game to a large extent. The golfer can escape the bunkers but he loses distance thereby. Emphasis today is laid upon punishing the proficient player."
Isn't it interesting that my course as originally designed by Ross basically had 13 holes that had top-shot bunkers in the 100-140 yard range almost directly across the line of play? And it also had numerous basically square greens, many very large.
So I don't really know if most all the members of my course over it's 80+ years thought they knew more about bunker placement than Donald Ross. But I do know they knew what they liked and wanted and the course very much shows that today as it has for many decades. There may have been many things done to my course over the years that weren't very well received but unfortunately (and I mean that) removing and then not restoring them was not one of them with the club's membership.
But still I'm sorry they went in 1940 and weren't subsequently restored in 2003.