JeffB:
Regarding your post #618, I know what you're saying about the railroads and an interconnection with powerful people and such and how that would almost definitely play out with that small rr land next to Merion G.C.
I hate to and hestitate to mention it on here because I generally just end up getting criticized for it by people like Moriarty or MacWood or whatever but you're talking to me about those people and the railroads I do know what I'm talking about with a lot of this "financing" and railroad history stuff.
My great, great grandfather was A.J. Drexel, the man who created Drexel & Co around the middle of the 19th century and turned it into one of the biggest and most powerful financing companies in the world (he's the same man in the book entitled "A.J.Drexel, The Man Who Made Wall St"). A.J. Drexel was also the man who "made" J.P. Morgan, considered to be the biggest financier in American history. As long as Drexel lived there was only one man in the world Morgan answered to and that was A.J. Drexel.
Around this era (1910) Drexel & Co was every bit as powerful as it had been (these types of finance companies essentially took the place of a US central bank because there was none in America from around 1827 to 1913 (the exact years of J.P. Morgan's life).
Companies like Drexel and then Drexel-Morgan in New York and then later J.P. Morgan & Co. were some of the most powerful underwriters of the entire American railroad system and just about everything else (A.J. Drexel even "made" Jay Cooke who created the underwriting of Government Bonds). The RRs depended on them to raise their money to construct and operate.
My great grandfather, James W. Paul, may've been the last member of the Drexel family to run Drexel & Co. He died in 1909 or something and Horatio Gates Lloyd apparently took his place as that kind of partner of Drexel & Co. The men who ran those RRs did not say no to anything from a man like Lloyd.
Just to show you how interconnected things were or are or can be around here, I see you mentioned Campbell Soup Co and the Dorrance family. Well, James W. Paul built this enormous place for himself maybe in the late 1890s or 1900. It's about five miles from Merion G.C. It was called Woodcrest or Woodmont or something (It's now Cabrini College). When he died around 1909 one of his daughters who was married to a guy called Charles Munn (Mr Palm Beach) moved into it and lived in it until 1925 when they sold it (Frances Munn divorced Munn and married a French WW1 aviator hero and moved to Paris and became a famous spy for the French underground in WW2) to the Dorrances and then became known as the magnificent Dorrance family estate. Before that some of it was sold to make what is now St. Davids G.C.
Jack Dorrance, who ran Campbell Soup for decades, was a friend of mine. He belonged to GMGC.
But the point of telling you all this background history since you mentioned this RR history is to explain that when the railroad owned a small piece of land around the Merion G.C. clubhouse there was no way in hell they would ever dream of holding up Merion and a guy like Horatio Gates Lloyd over it. The fact that the club never even bought that land until a number of years later is just indicative of all that. It was probably just the guy who ran that railroad doing Lloyd and Merion G.C. a favor because people like Lloyd and Drexel & Co were the people they got their money from.
Just watch how Moriarty treats this post. There's no question in my mind he absolutely hates to hear me explain this kind of history that had a direct influence on the history of Merion G.C. He'll probably accuse me of being and elitist next.
