Did A Rabid Gopher Inspire the Game Cornhole…Maybe?

This weekend I was at a really fun event, the Hillbilly Bash at the Saratoga Winery. One of the games everyone was playing was Cornhole. People were obsessed with getting in this tournament and were bragging and trash-talking each other about it. It got me thinking where in the world did this game even come from?

First and foremost, I had never heard of this game until I was visiting my brother in Cincinnati. We went out to a couple of bars and he said, "While we're 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 in Cincinnati about 15 years ago? Because of the large German population in the Cincinnati area.

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.

As 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.