"Does any of you really think it's possible to perfectly assign credit for every little detail -- particularly at a remove of 95, 96, 97 or 98 years?
Could you perfectly assign credit for every little detail of any project in which any of you, personally, has participated, even in the nearly immediate past?
I think it's vain to think you could."
Dan:
Of course not. I've been saying that all along to David Moriarty but he just seems to want to ignore it. I've said all along there probably never has been a specific laundry list of any golf course ever built as to who did what specifically, and that certainly includes Merion East.
This is why I think, as do others, that the only way the involvement of various people on golf course layout, design and construction projects can be determined with any degree of certainty is basically in a general sense, and never through some laundry list of who specifically contributed what, although occassionally we get just little glimpses of that here and there on certain holes or features like at Pine Valley and Richard Francis's mention of what he contributed to Merion East.
And that is why I believe that the people who were there and worked on the project every single day in its app six months of construction time were the ones who basically deserve the vast majority of the credit for the layout, design and construction of the course.
That anyone could think otherwise just seems illogical to me. The only thing that would indicate otherwise, in my opinion, would be if we found some drawings of the layout, holes, features, concepts, whatever with Macdonald's name on it. Or failing that a full-blown report by someone who would've known, like Hugh Wilson, explaining in detail what Macdonald or anyone else contributed specifically.
Unfortunately, Wilson's only mention of Macdonald in any way that could be construed as remotely specific said he taught them in that two day session at NGLA some of the right principles from famous courses abroad, ideas on golf course constrution and what THEY (the Merion "WE") should try to accomplish with their ("OUR") natural conditions.
The point is they are the ones who were there every day doing this and the best we can do is put Macdonald down there for one visit (what would that have been, perhaps a single day or less?) in the spring of 1911 and probably before the course went into construction.
If Hugh Wilson was described by his brother and the rest of the members of the Construction Committee as 'in the main the architect of the East and West Courses', then how much more significant can we get about who laid out, designed and oversaw the building of those courses?
I'd say there only can be a limited amount of "significant involvement" to spread around given that reality of what we know about Merion East from the Wilsons and other sources, which frankly in the broad scheme of things in this kind of research is a helluva lot.