If anyone is the unheralded "forgotten man" who certainly deserves more credit for his role in early American golf, I'm beginning to believe that it's Fred Pickering.
Consider the following accounts:
"As soon as Bendelow arrives he will get to work arranging for the course.
After he has finished his part of the work he will be succeeded by Mr. Pickering, another golf expert, who had charge of the actual work of building some 390 golf links. After Mr. Pickering has completed his task, the links will be ready for play. The eighteen-hole golf course at East Lake, when completed, will be one of the best in the country. The location was highly praised by Alex Findley, one of the world's recognized golf experts, when he was in Atlanta some time ago." - Atlanta Constitution 1905
"Mr. Pickering has charge of all the work of construction and has been busily engaged for some time past in acting as master of ceremonies. He has been interested in all the work, but his special delight is to talk about the course. Its unrivaled opportunities, its location, its natural advantages, and the thousand and one things which he is satisfied will within a short space of years make Atlanta more noted as a golf center than as a city of skyscrapers."
"On second thought there is no need to take your golf friend to the course. Just find Mr. Pickering, this veteran in the art of constructing courses, who has a record in this work longer than the string of victories of the New York National League club, and when you have found him ask him what he thinks of the East Lake club links. He will hand you out a dizzying line of Atlanta boosting golf that would make you believe that he had been born in the Gate City. "
""All you need to do," said he, "is just to give one tournament and get the cracks of the country to come here and look at the course and then await developments. Nothing to it. You won't be able to keep them away. Guns and constables could not keep them out. Yellow fever would not scare them off. They will come, and come to stay just as long as the season can be prolonged."" - Atlanta Constitution 1906
"His latest achievement far surpasses anything he has ever done in the construction of golf links." - News account 1912 reporting on his work at Merion
"Mr. Findlay will send here (Pittsburgh Field Club) Fred Pickering, the king of all golf course constructors, and he will guarantee a course and 18 perfect putting greens of the most undulating kind to be in perfect shape on the first day of June 1915. Should he fail, it would be the first time in his very long golfing career." - Pittsburgh Dispatch 1914 (as reported by Bob Labbance in "From Cricket to Golf")