Niall:
In your post #24 you raise a number of issues that I think all need to be carefully considered here if a good understanding is to be had of what was going on throughout those early years in a number of areas to do with both construction and particularly agronomy in the area of seeding (or not).
For instance, I don't think there is much question that some of the earliest INLAND courses abroad----eg most all of them in 1860s-70s-80s and probably well into the 1890s were just using the natural and existing grasses on the sites---- generally meadow grass that had probably been there for years.
Even at Merion East this was true to some extent. Wilson mentioned when he wrote (1916) his chapter for Piper and Oakley's book, Turf Grass for Golf, that there were a few fairways at Merion that were not even seeded as they felt the existing grass on them was good enough to use for golf. Not to even mention the semi-famous sort of in-house story of Merion known as "Merion Bluegrass." It was just discovered by Wilson et al when they first began to look at the land for the design of the course in early 1911. Wilson would just dig up samples, package them, send them to P&O at the US Dept of Agriculture and then they would discuss what it was and how useful it could be for golf as well as how to best maintain it----and remediate some of the agronomic problems that would crop up When they began to cut it and use it for golf.
Of course Wilson like the others of his time on these kinds of inland clay/loam sites that had generally been one kind of farm or another (either crops or grazing animals), were beginning to buy commercially gotten and packaged seed for golf but back then what to buy and use was very much the inexact science for sure. Some of those early guys such as Macdonald at NGLA and Wilson at Merion, and even Pine Valley began to develop their own sometimes massive experimental plots and seed nurseries. The US Dept of Agriculture had their own at Arlington Virginia but it was originally developed for forage grass experimentation but beginning around the second decade of the 20th century they developed the golf grass experimental plots big-time.
I think one of the first things we need to know (that may be a bit off the subject of Beale's bunker article) is when and where the first comprehensive seeding of golf courses was done. I suspect it was not until the very late 1890s at the earliest and perhaps not on all that many sites even at that time.
Compare to this INLAND reality the fact that linksland (seaside) courses were never originally seeded or planted either. That fact is the sort of second miraculous story (and far less known story) of the natural and God given linksland (seaside) sites-----eg their wholly natural features, sand, sand formations and blowouts and such as well as their naturally existing "swards" (original fairways) were not done at all by man-----those naturally existing "swards" were generally the eons long result of alluvial deposits that were remarkably acidic which through a form of natural selection (agronomic Darwinism) only two types of grasses were able to survive (those two types of grasses in those swards had no real competition).
And what were those pre-existing and naturally existing two types of grasses on those naturally occuring swards (fairways) which were basically the only genuses that could survive and prosper in that acidity (alkalinity) that was apparently that acidic from either the alluvial deposits in those naturally occuring swards and/or the fact that numerous birds both lived in them and more importantly constantly shit in them----eg obviously increasing the acidity or their soil?
You guessed it----festuca and agrostis----eg fescue and bent----two types of grass that both back then and still today are the most perfect grasses on which to play the game of GOLF!
PS;
That kind of seaside (linksland) naturally occuring sward soil and grass makeup, a combination of sandy loam and nutrietional material on top from the alluvial deposits and birds----which ironically pretty much existed in the English heathlands too once they finally discovered it under rhododendra and such was the type of playing surface that was often complementarily described as "springy"-----the type of surface the linksmen and many others back then believed was the ideal surface for golf.