How A Rabid Gopher Inspired The Game of Cornhole….Maybe?

Cornhole is the dumbest, most fun game you can play at a cookout, tailgate or even at your favorite bar, but where did it come from and how did it get that funny name?

I had never heard of this game until I was visiting my brother in Cincinnati. We went out to a couple bars and he said, "While were there we should play some Cornhole." I was like....EXCUSE ME? That's when I found out that there were dozens of bars in the Cincinnati area that had full-on leagues dedicated to it. Why did it become so popular i Cincinnati about 15 years ago? Because of the large German population in the Cincinnati area.

Nobody is 100% sure where the game Cornhole came from, but it's mostly attributed to a 14th Century cabinetmaker in Germany that was watching two kids throw rocks into gopher holes....not exactly X-Box, but I'm sure it was thrilling for the time. This cabinet maker decided it would be safer for children to throw soft bags filled with dirt at a piece of wood with a hole in it, he build it and thus Cornhole was born. It also cut down on Gopher attacks on children that threw rocks in their gopher holes....so that was good too.

So the story goes that a German immigrant brought the game to the Ohio Valley. This immigrant was a farmer in Kentucky and instead of filling the soft bags with dirt he used the abundance of corn on his farm as the filler. He started calling it Cornhole and the rest was history.

Like I said, this is all just legend and hearsay from hundreds of years ago...so who knows. However, the gopher attack on children absolutely happened....and that inspired Wack-A-Mole, but that's a story for another time.

Get a team together and join us for the 2nd Annual Budweiser Folds of Honor Cornhole Tournament this weekend (September 28th) at Pitney Meadows Community Farm in Saratoga. Teams are limited so sign up today at www.q1057.com.