When was merion built

Free viewers are required for some of the attached documents. They can be downloaded by clicking on the icons below. Please enable JavaScript in your browser for a better user experience. Jump to subpage In , Lower Merion was established as an independent Township with about 52 landholders and tenants.

Before departing on his study trip abroad, Wilson wisely traveled to Southampton, New York to visit with C. Years earlier, Macdonald had taken a similar journey in search of templates to duplicate at his National Golf Links of America. Thereafter, Wilson traveled extensively, spending seven months overseas playing and studying the great courses.

When Wilson finally returned from his trip, he was well prepared to design a golf course for the ages. Like Macdonald, Hugh Wilson had been profoundly influenced by the great golf holes each had studied overseas.

However, unlike Macdonald at N. The great golf writer Herbert Warren Wind put it this way. While not detracting the least from C.

It has been said that Hugh Wilson grasped the principles of Scottish and English course design and conveyed them in his work better than Charles Blair Macdonald. However, to compare Merion to the National Golf Links is somewhat of an apples and oranges proposition. Wilson never intended to design Merion under such constraints. Yet none of the holes at Merion is an out and out copy.

Or so the story goes. But as is often the case with creation stories, this one is a blend of myth and reality. In reality, Wilson neither planned the routing nor conceived of the holes at Merion East.

They laid the course out on the ground and built it according to plan. When building the course, the Committee had wisely left many of the hazards to be built later, and while traveling overseas Wilson got ideas for the finishing touches on the new course. Finally, while the original routing plan for Merion East may never be located, we can piece together enough of the early history to know that H.

Barker sketched the first routing plan, but it may have been superceded by C. MacDonald and H. Whigham, who played a major role in planning the course. Lloyd also contributed. Members had been golfing at Merion since , when they had laid-out a nine-hole course on acres of land leased from the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In , Clement A. Griscom, the shipping magnate and a prominent member of Merion, generously began allowing the club to use a portion of their estate to expand the course to 18 holes, free of charge. By , the Board of Governors of the Merion Cricket Club had recognized that golf had come to stay, but that large tracts of land were becoming scarce while real estate prices rose. So Merion began to take steps to secure a permanent golf site. Among the investors in the development company was a group of men from the Merion Cricket Club, lead by H.

By summer , Haverford Development Company had secured approximately contiguous acres including the Johnson Farm property. The information received by the developers turned out to be prophetic. To Haverford Development Company, the land for the golf site was a loss leader meant to attract buyers for the surrounding land. They even promised Merion that all of the bordering houses would be built facing the golf course.

To make the offer even more enticing, the developers even tried to supply the golf course, or at least the architect and design. They brought in a professional golf course architect, H. Barker, to inspect the site and to draw up a plan. According to Walter Travis, he and Barker had often discussed golf course design at Garden City, and Travis had encouraged Barker to pursue a career the golf course design business.

Prior to that, he may have been the best-known professional golf course architect regularly practicing in America, and was probably second only to C. Macdonald among both amateurs and professionals. At the time he planned the course for Merion, Barker claimed to have already planned upwards of 20 courses. He also had reportedly planned or remodeled three courses in or near Philadelphia. Making the deal even more enticing, and to allay any appearance of double dealing or impropriety, H.

Lloyd put it in a letter to the membership:. The members of the club who subscribed to the stock of the Haverford Development Company. The reason for this was that they were unwilling to put themselves in the position of having received what may prove to be a privilege not enjoyed by every other member.

G Whigham, to inspect the site. These gentlemen, besides being famous golfers, have given the matter of Golf Course construction much study, and are perfectly familiar with the qualities of grasses, soils, etc. It was Mr. Tillinghast reviewed the new course at length in the American Cricketer and was generally appreciative of its merits The old quarry, which is traversed by the last three holes, is a wonderfully effective natural hazard and makes these holes a fine finish The yawning quarry makes the 17th look fearsome enough, but the terror is more imaginary than real.

The 16th is a corker It is a real gem If your drive is a good one, before you stretches the old quarry, its cliff-like sides frowning forbiddingly.

Just beyond, and sparkling like an emerald, is the green, calling for a shot that is brave and true. It seems almost like a coy but flirtatious maiden with mocking eyes flashing at you from over her fan, and as you measure the distance between, you are fired with the ambition to show off a bit No one will ever play Merion without taking away the memory of No.

In tidying up the place, the floor has been made very clean and there is no great difficulty in getting out. It might as well be just a bit harder. The 3rd hole is a remarkably fine one-shotter and presents a closely guarded green On the 7th, if the drive is not played close along the boundary on the right, the approach to the terraced green from the left is very bothersome The 13th is a nice short hole, although the green seems a shade large considering the length of the shot.

With the teeing ground moved to the extreme left, the demands of the hole are exacting Dunes grass in bunkers at the green of the short par-3 13th hole. Summing up, Tillinghast pointed out that comparatively few bunkers were yet in place, then concluded on a somewhat muted note: "I believe that Merion will have a real championship course, and Philadelphia has been crying out for one for many years.

The construction committee, headed by Hugh I. Wilson, has been thorough in its methods and deserves the congratulation of all golfers. Holes 10, 11, and 12 all played across Ardmore Avenue, 11 on the drive, 10 and 12 on the second shot. The 10th and 12th were longer 75 yards in the case of the 10th, 20 yards in the case of the 12th then than they are today. However, lest the notion of actually flying shots over a busy suburban artery seems all but inconceivable, it should be borne in mind that in Ardmore Avenue was, to all intents and purposes, a little-traveled country road that could indeed be viewed as a reasonable hazard in the natural order of things.

The fabled "Baffling Brook" 11th, one of the great short-to-medium two-shotters in the world. But in no sense should they be viewed as a wholesale revamping of it. While the years have witnessed a number of refinements, these have been restricted for the most part to the construction of new tees in order to lengthen the course the measurement from the back was 6, yards; today it is 6, yards—not even a yard difference and to alterations in the siting and shaping of certain bunkers.

In Hugh Wilson began an ambitious pro-gram to revise the bunkering. He did not live to execute it, dying only a few weeks later of pneumonia. He was 45 years of age. Romantic view across the abandoned quarry to the green on the 16th. In the decades since, the world has come to recognize the classic virtues of the masterpiece that is Merion East. Few there are who have not succumbed to its extraordinary combination of beauty and character and fairness, its succession of 18 superlative—and individual—golf holes.

It was written by a golf course architect who, with his penchant for infusing drama and danger into his designs, no matter what the cost, has emerged as one of the two or three most innovative—indeed, iconoclastic—forces in the history of his profession. In Golf Journal on the eve of the U. The building of it must have presented an awesome challenge to Hugh Wilson. The gently rolling farmland chosen for the site in no way resembled the rugged tide-swept linksland he had studied. Yet he so thoroughly grasped the basic concepts of English and Scottish courses that he was able to reproduce many of their characteristics.

He first made a superb routing, gently climbing the holes early in the game, and then winding toward the clubhouse, switching the boundary dramatically from the right to the left side and then bringing the player home over the old quarry. He left the green sites at the existing ground level, and then with men and mules transformed their perimeters. Using great resourcefulness, he simulated the abrupt, rugged lines of a links course. The fairway bunkers were raised, humped, dished, and made irregular.

The original landscaping on this open land was left bleak to complete the links-like look. Later planting at Merion tended to obscure this look, but the great challenge of the course remains.