Cornhole Winners to Win Cash at Farley Fest

Do you have your Cornhole team together? Better get crackin’! The Cornhole Tournament – a Farley Fest tradition – starts at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 20.  Registration begins at 5:30 p.m. or pre-register at http://www.farleyfest.com/  Entry fee is just $30 per two-member team. Winners bag a sweet 75 percent cash payout. 

If you’ve been to a backyard barbecue, you’ve probably played a game or two. If you’re always crowned the winner at your family reunion, it’s time to show off your cow pie and skunk the competition this year at Farley Fest.

Cornhole, like most Midwestern sports, has interesting roots. One of the theories is that it came from the British game quoits (pronounced almost like quarts). Quoits was played by tossing a two to three-pound metal ring at a stake, called a hob. The National Quoits Association claims it was one of the sports played at the first Greek Olympics, and the Greeks introduced it to the Romans, who took the game to Britain. Others say the game originated in Germany, when a fourteenth-century cabinetmaker Matthias Kueperman saw children tossing rocks into a groundhog hole. Legend says he decided to create a safer game. Legend doesn’t say if it was safer for the children or safer for the groundhog.

Could be a kernel of truth in each of these theories, but, what we do know is that by the early 19th Century, quoits contests had popped up all across the British countryside. The rural Brits often lacked a proper set, though, and made do with horseshoes. Thus, a quoit was sometimes called a shoe. Because the English countryside was frequently rainy and muddy and heavy iron objects thrown about the manor had a tendency to break crockery, Friend W. Smith invented a portable, cushioned game board with rubber “shoes”  to take the game indoors. He called his game Parlor Quoits.

Across the Pond, sturdy and fun-loving American pioneers were throwing horseshoes and playing bean bags by the early 1860s. Bean bags, supposedly invented by the Egyptians around 2000 BC., were round, leather, and most likely filled with beans or small stones. Native Americans of the US – the Blackhawks of the Illinois in particular – are said to have filled pig bladders with dried beans and tossed them for recreation. During some games they tossed the bags into holes

So, in 1883, when an American Heyliger de Windt filed a patent application for Parlor Quoits, he stood on the shoulders of many great traditions. His patent – a hybrid– however, included a slanted board and used a central hole that was square instead of round. It also offered an optional bell.

De Windt, who was the great-great grandson of President John Adams, sold the rights to his game design to the first large-scale toy manufacturer in the US. The Massachusetts-based company, Converse, marketed a version of de Windt’s game and changed its name to Faba Baga ( Faba is Latin for bean.) to differentiate it from both quoits and bean bags. Faba Baga also sported different-sized holes worth different point values, and each player received one extra-large bag per round, which scored double points. From there, Cornhole has continued to undergo as many evolutions as the iphone..

Although the mystery of Cornhole’s history might never be solved, the winner of the Cornhole Tournament at 2025 Farley Fest will be determined this Friday night, June 20. Don’t miss it!