Before that we were mostly talking info and facts, and not personalities. At that point, Mike Cirba even agreed with you that WC laid out the original course. Not sure what changed his mind, or simply left him wondering about the lack of WC in club records, which for anyone wanting to know the truth, should be part of the story, no?
Jeff,
Yes, at that point it did seem to me that Wilie Campbell was the sole designer of the original course at Myopia based on the evidence that had been presented to date on the thread, even if there were some obvious open questions.
He still may very well have been. However, I now believe it most likely that both stories are true.
What changed? Well, after having the privilige of playing at Myopia this past October, and after David resurrected the old thread to make some other point on another thread, I began my own search into Myopia's early origins using my own limited newspaper archive subscription, and began to get a much fuller, if still incomplete picture.
Before then, I did no research at all on the club and only knew very sketchily what had been presented here over months, as I periodically followed along.
However, even just simple searches for "Appleton", "Merrill", and "Gardner" yielded a whole lot of new information that somehow had never been presented here previously.
Before then, we were told they were dunces who didn't even play the game, who were derided as "Master of the Hounds", who had no experience with the game prior to Campbell's arrival. We were even told that HC Leeds didn't play golf until the spring of 1894 and then learned everything he knew about playing the game and about architecture from Willie Campbell. We were also told that all of this information came from well-documented, multiple news sources.
What I found was very different.
Instead, ALL of these men had been playing the game from the inception of golf at The Country Club in Brookline. Leeds in particular was already mastering it, being the best player there by six shots.
I also learned that Appleton and Merrill were assigned sometime before April 15, 1894 to a subcommitee charged with bringing golf to Myopia, and that the third, AP Gardner, was in Hamilton that spring as well at his in-laws.
We also learned that Appleton was golfing on his estate, probably with the same group of friends.
But what really led me to start doubting the story of Campbell being authoritative was the number of flagrant errors, plagiarism (or the same writer for multiple papers), and base misunderstanding of the game of golf so self-evident in many of those articles appearing in the high-society gossip columns of that time.
I had previously found, and posted, and article from one paper talking about Myopia opening "two new links". A few weeks liater, Joe Bausch sends me an article from another paper that reported the same thing in slightly different words. This to me confirmed what I'd seen earlier, where David Moriarty posted about sheep coming to Myopia in mid-May, and then I found a only very slightly differently-worded article in another paper saying the same thing.
Also, strangely, almost all the articles seemed to intermingle the goings-on at Myopia and Essex, as if they were a single entitiy. And...we DO know that Campbell was employed at Essex at that time and that he had indeed enlarged the course at that club in the same timeframe.
But the coup de grace for me was when Joe Bausch sent me an article that had the Opening Day tournament played at Myopia reported as happening on the Essex CC course in Manchester!!
So, at this stage, I can neither sincerely discount what Weeks or John May of Golf Digest found that indicated that Appletion, Gardner, and Merrill staked out the original course, and I don't think anyone could do that without seeing what sources exist within the club that they used.
Neither can I sincerely discount that Willie Campbell may have done the whole thing, sometime in late May. Still, that doesn't seem to make any sense to me when I consider that reports were that the greens were sodded and cut prior to opening. That just feels like something that would take some time to get done
So, I think the very sincere position is we don't know. I think anyone who argues that they KNOW what happened is either deceiving themselves, or trying to deceive us.
I find it funny that someone would accuse me of being a "preservationist", which is something I'd like to take up on another thread at an appropriate time. I have no issue with modifying the stories of the creation of our courses as new evidence surfaces....when we found others involved besides Hugh Wilson with the creation of Cobb's Creek we EMBRACED those stories because they added a richness of detail and complexity that we hadn't previously known, that ultimately enriched the history of that course, not detracted from it.
But I guess it's easier to argue against a stereotyped strawman than against reality.
I don't object to the addition of new materials and evidence about any course's origins; I object to the bending of facts, the straining of phrases, the introduction of new myths seeking to wholly replace old ones.
I want the rest of the story.
Have a great day!