(This column first appeared in the September print edition of the Hendersonian.)
Probably no person alive today remembers that the site beside Homer’s Barbecue, which has been redeveloped into the Hangout at Homer’s outdoor event venue, was ever anything but a parking lot.
But there was a time, in the early Depression years, when that site on Second Street between Main and Water streets was home to a Tom Thumb Miniature Golf Course. Yes, mini-golf in downtown Henderson.
Miniature golf enjoyed a craze in the 1920s and early 1930s. Perhaps no one contributed more to the fad than a gifted promoter and salesman named Garnet Carter, who with his wife developed Rock City Gardens of “See Rock City” fame atop Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga. He also developed the Fairyland Inn atop the mountain, and there the Carters in 1928 built a miniature golf course.
While Carter didn’t invent the concept of miniature golf, played with a putter and a ball on a small course featuring often-whimsical obstacles. But he is credited with obtaining the first patent for a mini-golf course.
He wasted no time in selling the concept to others. His Fairyland Manufacturing Co., among others, marketed the concept furiously. A full-page ad in the Omaha Sunday Bee-News in 1930 was headlined, “A NEW, EASY WAY TO MAKE A LOT OF MONEY.”
The ad described Tom Thumb miniature golf as “that sporty little game which millions of people are playing” and “offers you the greatest opportunity of a lifetime to make a lot of money on a small investment.”
The key was its surface. Natural grass would be worn out by being trampled by thousands of feet in no time. But Tom Thumb courses used a patented method using cotton seed hulls that could be dyed green that “play like grass and wear indefinitely.”
“Thousands of these money-making courses are being installed in all parts of the country,” the ad said. It cited springtime receipts of a Tom Thumb course on Long Island, New York, that on rain-free days typically ran from $150 to $200 a day (about $2,800 to $3,800 in today’s dollars), and on some days $250 to $300.
“All you need,” the ad said, “is a good location. Select a vacant piece of property at least 75 feet by 125 feet (the larger the better) where lots of people pass — install your Tom Thumb and instantly the fun starts for the players and the profits start for you … If you have a good location in a few weeks you have your investment back and the rest is all profit.”
Mini-golf was a sensation. In August 1930, the Commerce Department estimated that of the 25,000 mini-golf courses in the country, more than half had been built since January, Popular Science magazine reported that year.
Including one in downtown Henderson. On May 21, 1930, an ad in the Henderson Morning Gleaner proclaimed that a lighted, 18-hole Tom Thumb Miniature Golf Course would open at 2 o’clock that afternoon in the 100 block of Second Street. The course was to be open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week, and the green fee was just 25 cents a person (about $4.75 today).
The first day of business appeared promising. The Gleaner the next day said the Tom Thumb had received a “warm reception,” with “many persons” trying their skill amid its sand bunkers and water hazards from the time it opened until closing time.
News reports didn’t identify the course’s owner. But a short Gleaner article on June 3, 1930, reported that the manager, Robert Hickman, said interest in playing the Tom Thumb was growing daily. The account said there was “a constant flow” of patrons from opening until closing time. That summer, the course organized a league that attracted 12 men’s teams and six ladies’ teams; the Gleaner sports page reported on league standings.
Alas, the timing was not great for Henderson’s Tom Thumb mini-golf course. The dark tobacco market, which once built fortunes, had collapsed years earlier under British tariffs. The advent of the automobile had knocked the legs out of the city’s carriage factories. And the huge cotton mill out on Washington Street, which once employed hundreds, had closed a few years earlier.
And then there was the matter of that inconvenience known as the Great Depression.
The high tide of the miniature golf craze of that era didn’t last long. It seems that 25 cents could be applied more wisely to other investments.
A brief news item in The Gleaner of Feb. 23, 1933, reported on a “grass fire on a vacant lot where the miniature golf links were formerly located on Second Street, between Main and Water.”
In late May 1937, a classified ad announced: “Opening Saturday Stanley’s Park Lot. Second Street between Main and Water Streets. Open till 11 P.M.” A 1956 Sanborn fire insurance map showed it as a parking lot, with an attendant’s booth at the entrance from Second Street.
And so it remained … until, 95 years after the opening of the Tom Thumb course, it’s once again being converted to recreational use.
