CornWhole, not Cornhole

  In college, I took a class for my humanities requirement called, “The History of the Midsection: Midwifery, the Midwest, and Midlife Crises.” My professor thought that, as rich, coastal elitists, we might begin to understand the Midwest in an attempt to better grasp the mindset of rust belt/Bible belt/belt buckle/bootstrap Trump supporters. The final project for the unit was a short report on a piece of Midwestern culture that is often misunderstood by whiny liberals. I’ve chosen the lawn game that you’ve probably been forced into playing by your uncle’s drunk high school friend at a barbecue, cornhole. There is a large misconception around cornhole, mostly regarding its name. Most people believe that the name must have come from a beanbag, probably filled with corn, was being tossed into a hole. This seems probable, but the origins of the game actually reveal a completely different history.

  Cornhole was invented around the turn of the 20th century by two farmers in Indiana, Orville and Wilbur Redenbacher. After learning of the industrialization of factories in New York City in the day’s newspaper, Fort Wane Weekly, the brothers realized that they too could modernize their industry. They started thinking about the raw materials that go into feeding livestock: largely, the vast amount of grass it took to feed their cows. They realized that they could open up more area to plant by feeding the animals some of the corn that they had been growing and eating. The unused grazing fields could go towards growing other crops, like beans of some kind. They weren’t sure yet which kind, but knew of at least three varieties they were interested in. They decided to give the cows a mix of grass and corn to start.

  Soon after the diet change, the Redenbacher brothers noticed something strange. The cow manure often had whole corn kernels, seemingly undigested. The brothers realized that feeding corn to cows must not be good for them since they weren’t digesting any of it, and they decided to go back to grass. Unfortunately, they had already tilled and sown a plot with kidney beans, mung beans, and, at the request of their local saloon pianist, William Ferguson, black-eyed peas. He had a feeling that they would be both cheap to grow and dense in nutrients. They decided they would have to keep the cows on the corn-based diet for the time being and wound up grinding the corn so that it could be better digested.

  After the cow situation, they started experimenting with themselves and other livestock to see if corn could be broken down in the stomach. They found that they too could not digest the kernels. This is, of course, known by anyone who frequents one of those cool, hip burrito places where white people pretend to make Mexican food in the 21st century but wasn’t known by the two farmers. There was no electricity and they couldn’t see the yellow kernels in the dark outhouses, obviously. They fed corn to the pigs, horses, and sheep, and found all the kernels intact. 

  The brothers found themselves at a fork in the road: did they continue their studies of animal diets, or try to profit on their findings? They chose the latter, because this is America, and began brainstorming a simple way to teach people that corn wasn’t digestible. The world needed to know. They thought the information might be best given through a game. Their creation, which we now call cornhole, was conceived.

  Here’s how their original game worked. Kernel-shaped, burlap beanbags were sown by Orville’s wife, Cora, and filled with the extra beans they had harvested. The idea was that a beanbag, which they called a “corn”, would go through a circular opening in a slab of propped up wood they had stolen from a lumber mill. This is how they named the game. They wanted to demonstrate that corn comes out whole. The circle in the plank of wood represented the hole where waste comes out in an animal, and the beanbag was a whole corn kernel. Corn came out whole. CornWhole.

  The game was a hit in the community and each family in the town developed their own scoring system. After a round, the players would lift up the planks of wood and laugh as they said “corn, whole!” The brothers ended up selling the game to the newly founded games company, Wham-O, who turned the game into a cheap plastic version.

  Eventually, the game took on a life of its own, and because there was literally no internet at all, the story of how the game came to be was lost. With the true educational back story lost, people started spelling the game 'c-o-r-n-h-o-l-e', mostly because of the hole in the wood.

  With the money they earned selling the game, the brothers continued to experiment with corn. In a stroke of genius, Wilbur later invented popcorn, which was so lucrative that Orville ended up killing Wilbur so that he himself could profit. Orville Redenbacher went on to start the first popcorn business after completely scrubbing his brother from history.