Jeff,
I am apparently the only one who understands what I meant in that section of my essay, and have said on many occassions that if I ever get to revise my essay with verifiable information, I will rewrite that section. I have also explained this numerous times and won't go into great detail here, since every time I do it is just ignored anyway.
I think that, generally, "to lay out" a golf course meant arranging the golf course on the ground, whether staking it out, marking it out, or even by building it. This is distinquished from planning a golf course, which can be done on the ground as one marks, stakes, or lays out the course, but can also be done on paper, without actually arranging anything out on the ground. So if all Barker did was to inspect the land and draw out his proposed layout plan, he had not yet not laid out the course. Sometimes (and I believe this is what happened at Merion) the process of planning the course was seperate from the process of laying out the course. For example, at Columbia H.H. Barker planned the course but it was laid out later, by someone else.
While they may have still been planning the lay out at NGLA, or at least working out the details of the plan (as I say in my essay.) I obviously don't know for certain, but I imagine it was all together . . . next, a mirrored redan would work on that plateau next to the barn foundation . . . this is what it is and how it works, and tomorrow I will show you what it looks like and explain how to build it. Then . . . .
So in sum, yes, sometimes "to lay out" referred to building the course, sometimes to staking or marking it out, but almost always involved some sort of arranging fof the course ON THE ACTUAL PROPERTY. It didn't necessarily involve planning at all, and that is the important point.
So, when Lesley noted that they had laid out many courses on the new grounds I think he probably meant that they had tried to arrange many different courses. You keep assuming that this was Wilson's Committee, but I have seen no evidence that this was the case. For all we know, the "many different courses" could have been Barker's, modified, by Francis, modified by M&W. Or it could have been Barker's modified by M&W modified by Francis modified by-Barker again, modified by Wilson's Committee, modified by M&W.
The point is, we don't know.
As for the yardage, I believe the yardage Tom gave you is the stated yardage in at least one of the articles. I don't know that he measured it himself. I have measured it, doing as best I could to figure out where the tees were, based on early depictions, descriptions, and sometimes the 1916 schematics, and while it is not an exact science, the course is well short of what was listed.
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Peter Wrote:
David - Jeff said it better than I did (in my answer to Tom M) in his previous postscript to you; for me the line about "the following is my idea for a 6,000 yard course" seems telling, i.e. while I know things work differently today than they did back then, it's hard for me to see why CBM would follow that line with such a generic-seeming set of yardages (even if he had some sense that he'd have a chance at a 'do-over' later on).
Again Peter, I don't understand your point in this context. Whatever you think of the alleged letter, the Committee based their recommendation largely on M&W's opinion. I don't think the letter contains a routing, but I think it contains some clues that M&W had been thinking about where holes should be added, but I've discussed this repeatedly