"I can't believe I actually own this"

John Paul Newport details the fascinating saga of North Shore Country Club's architectural geneology and the role some Golf Club Atlas discussion group participants played in determining its original architect.

But by early December the communal intelligence of the posters began to focus on one thing: Not one piece of contemporary evidence linked Mr. Tillinghast to North Shore. So on Dec. 4 a contributor named Steve Shaffer, a retired attorney from Philadelphia, hopped on an Amtrak train and paid a visit to the New-York Historical Society. In the archives there he located the records of the Harmonie Club, the German-Jewish Manhattan social club dating from 1852 that started North Shore.

"I fully expected to find documents connecting Tillinghast to the golf course. There had to be some reason he had been known as the architect without dispute for all those years," Mr. Shaffer told me. But he didn't. Instead, he found evidence authorizing payments to Mr. Raynor, and an official thank you, in 1916, to him, Mr. Macdonald and Robert White, the course superintendent, for creating the course.

As a courtesy, Mr. Shaffer presented his findings to the club before posting them at GolfClubAtlas.com. Mr. Hissey later paid his own visit to the New-York Historical Society, thoroughly searched North Shore's archives (he found a lost trove of material in an attic under the club's widow's walk) and contacted a slew of golf historians. He, too, has been unable to unearth any reference to Mr. Tillinghast's involvement, nor any evidence for why he got credit.