Mike,
I think we are all missing it, but its in that newspaper shared last night by Bryan.....in the article below - They were giving each founder profitable one acre melon patches! They say they were very profitable!
BTW, if it was a shared bathhouse for the members, I don't want to delve into those details.
As to what "Make sense" regarding those final property lines, I hope David will answer, because I am starting to believe some legal procedures would probably describe what makes sense more than a newspaper report. I speculated that he probably still had some wiggle room from that blue line print property line, but he didn't still have a carte blanch over the 450 acres to be determined later.
I have argued that it took longer to finalize the routing than certainly three days, but I would also argue that that figuring out the basic property after October doesn't allow enough time either. I have argued it wouldn't make sense for CBM to route on property he didn't own, but it doesn't make sense to have Raynor survey 450 acres in a short time, either. It seems to me whatever maps he sent would have been narrowed down.
I agree they had some latitude, but was it the 2-3 acres of extra land Merion later had, or was it the right to do as Pat once suggested, go up into some superior land on the future Sabin estate? I can envision it being very minor, a la a tweak of the border on the blue print. But, I think David or another lawyer on this site would be better qualified to describe the probable technicalities that you, me, or some cub reporter from 1906......and I can't envision a real estate company giving CBM endless time to make up his mind, as they were business people. Likewise, I can't figure CBM studying for over a year and cramming all the routing into three months......
As to the "distances and holes to be reproduced", as I have said to you in an email, I think he had land allocations in mind, basically two holes wide, with some holes firmly fixed (like 3, 4, 13, 14,) and probably others - like 18, (if its a water hole, we know its going to be snug to the water) 17 (the hilltop tee was easy to find early, and started to set up the counterclockwise routing, and then 1 and 2 to get back somewhere near where he envisioned the 3rd tee for Alps, etc.) I think 14-15 and 5-12 could have been less defined placeholders, with fewer signature topo features.
Depending on David's answers, I accept his term of "rough routing" even though I envision it slightly differently and might have used different terms. Not only am I a moron.....I may be overly finicky in terminology.