Brett,
My apologies for my typo, but that actually shows the point. There are an awful lot of letters in "Kingston Golf Club, Kingston, NY" for it to be a simple typo.
You stated, “I don’t mind when people speculate. That seems like a reasonable thing to do when you conduct research, but your speculation should be open for debate.” I completely agree with that point. This conclusion of mine should be open for debate. I welcome it, but debating the validity of a conclusion should also be based on facts not “maybes” such as “What if Kingston was a typo on the 1926 brochure?”
So let’s consider some facts. In the September, 1934 issue of Golf Illustrated, Tilly wrote that he had “been for thirty years very actively engaged in golf course architecture.” That statement alone proves that Shawnee, which he began working on in 1909, could not have been his first golf course. So which course was, and his phrase “actively engaged” certainly implies there to have been more than one before Shawnee. In an effort to identify these, and as many other golf courses that haven’t been recognized as being the work of Tilly as is possible, that is why I spent a number of years trying to define them, always based on fact and not by any bias.
I was committed to that because I had already made that mistake in the case of Kingston some 15 years prior when Lou Chanin approached me with the idea that Tilly designed the new course for Kingston in 1902. He believed it was on a specific date that Tilly was on site and I was able to disprove that with a newspaper article that showed that he was elsewhere. That is where bias stepped in, something I deeply regret to this day. My bias? That I accepted what had been told me about Tilly, that Shawnee was his first design. I simply couldn’t accept that there had been others before it, yet he clearly stated that there were in his 1934 statement. It was some years later, after reading that and other similar statements by Tilly such as one that had him “giving advice to club’s boards on possible changes to their courses” at the turn of the century, that I recognized my mistake. And so, I have made a conscious effort to not make conclusions in a biased way in any of the more than 240 courses that are included in my new book. It is because of this that 15 of these courses are identified with the phrase “With Questions” because just as there is some proof he worked on them there are questions about the amount and exactly what he did that need answering through further research. Kingston is not one of these.
Fact: Tilly designed a new 9-hole golf course for Kingston Golf Club. How do we know this? Because he wrote that he did in that brochure. The follow-up to this is when did he do this? As previously shown, since Kingston/Twaaflskill have only had two new courses built in their history, in 1898 and 1902, and we can eliminate 1898, the only other one that Tilly could have designed was the 1902 course. Deduction and neither bias nor “a few coincidences” led to that conclusion.
I am quite certain that some will disagree with my conclusion, and based on some facts that they are applying. Fact: “nobody knows who designed this course in 1902.” I accept that with the addition of three words, for a certainty. But someone absolutely did. The Van Ettens, both father and son, were considered as strong possibilities. As Tom can tell you, he and I had that discussion in private months ago, with my arguments against it not bias-based, rather on known facts.
Fact: There is no one else other than Tilly whose name has been directly attributed as being the person who designed either of the two new courses that Kingston/Twaaflskill have had built in the long history of their club.Tilly had to have designed it at some time.