Joe, Paul and Wayne:
That article and particularly the drawing of the course in the article is most interesting and should probably take some additional thought in a number of areas as to what it means about the design and construction of the golf course and the progression of both from 1913 until Crump died in Jan. 1918..
First of all, I doubt that drawing in the article is by Colt. At the very most I think all it could be is someone’s copy of the Colt whole course drawing that we bought off of eBay.
Until that Colt whole course drawing turned up on eBay it seems pretty certain that no one knew for years that Colt actually did a whole course drawing for Pine Valley. John Arthur Brown never mentioned it when he wrote Pine Valley’s first history book. Warner Shelley never mentioned it when he wrote Pine Valley’s second history book and Jim Finegan never mentioned it when he recently wrote the third and last Pine Valley history book. When I started researching the creation of the course all the club thought Colt did for the design and left behind was that hole by hole booklet that has always been in the possession of the club.
Then that Colt whole course drawing turned up on eBay after all those decades and it certainly is pretty close to the hole-by-hole drawings in the Colt booklet.
So where the hell was that Colt whole course drawing all these years that we bought off of eBay? That’s a good question and I suspect at some point during the construction of the course it was just taken off-site by someone and it never returned. Wherever that Colt whole course drawing we bought ended up all these years I suspect it was somewhere around Clementon probably stuck in a closet or attic for the last 90 years or so until someone finally discovered it relatively recently and took it to a local flea market and sold it for $56 to a bartender from Clementon who put it on eBay and frankly made a ton of money on it!
We bought that Colt whole course map off of eBay from that Clementon bartender.
But I’m pretty sure Colt’s whole course map we bought was probably used on-site to some extent for the simple reason it does have those typical “fold lines” on it which means it was in and out of someone’s pocket a lot on-site. The “blue/red” line topo map that’s hung in the clubhouse all those years has the same fold-lines on it as does Crump’s original stick routing topo map that probably preceded Colt’s first and apparently only visit in May/June 1913.
I do know the “blue/red” line topo map that hangs in the clubhouse was used on-site for years by Crump et al for the simple reason that it has numerous iterations and alterations of holes that occurred throughout those years. In this vein, Tillinghast’s constant writing about Pine Valley and how things were progressing and changing on various holes over the years is of tremendous help that way in the creation of a virtual timeline that explains those alterations on that “blue/red” line topo.
And so are the so-called "Remembrances" of Crump's two best Pine Valley friends, Carr and Smith, who chronicled either contemporaneously and/or just after Crump died the things he was doing and thinking and the things he planned on doing (had he lived).
But consider this for a minute because it could be one of the finest examples to date of what I call “looking through the prism backwards”. By that I mean we today must always keep in mind the things that we know and think that those men back then could not have known for the simple reason a number of things and a number of factors came after them that they couldn’t have known about.
And one of those things just could be certain forms of technology that did not yet exist such as how could one get Colt’s whole course drawing into a newspaper article in 1914? One couldn’t copy it and reduce it in size because those kinds of inventions wouldn’t come for maybe another forty years.
And if that’s all true to say which it seems to me it is, then how did that drawing above get into that Inquirer article and who did it? I doubt Colt did it because at that point he was back in England and I doubt they got him to do another drawing just for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper.
Maybe someone at Pine Valley or some artist for the paper did a copy of Colt’s whole course drawing just for that newspaper article and that would explain why that drawing has a number of differences from Colt’s whole course drawing that we bought on eBay.
In the next post I’ll go over what those differences are between Colt's whole course drawing that we bought and that newspaper drawing above and what those differences probably mean about the design and construction of the golf course at that point and who was doing it and who was changing things and why and how.