The Shadow
The year was 1930. The Great Depression was beginning, and the economy was shrinking. Suddenly, America discovered that it could shrink golf as well.
In the mid-to-late 1920s, Garnet Carter added a new attraction to his Fairyland resort on Lookout Mountain, on the Tennessee–Georgia line: a putting course dressed in nursery-tale statuary and threaded with tile, hollow logs, and bits of sewer pipe. Guests deserted the regular golf course to play it. Carter called the game Tom Thumb Golf and sold it as a business, complete with a dyed cottonseed hull putting surface and tin runways.
Courses popped up across the nation, in vacant lots, on rooftops, in auto garages, behind movie palaces, and on the floors of restaurants whose tables no longer paid the rent.
In 1930, the new sport reached critical mass. In August, the U.S. Commerce Department counted some 25,000 miniature courses in the country, with 15,000 built since January, representing an investment of $125 million that year — over $2.4 billion in today’s dollars.
In May 1930, the Covington Virginian reported that the chambers of commerce of Covington and Clifton Forge were meeting with E. M. Brady of Florida, a designer of “country club junior golf” courses. His layouts differed from Tom Thumb courses, which could be played with a putter alone, by including two holes that required lofted clubs. They also had “hazards, bunkers, sand traps, and some that are not found on the standard courses.” The paper noted that miniature courses were doing well in Richmond and Roanoke and asked if they would work in smaller towns. Brady said a $1,200 investment “would be a paying one.”
The Virginian reported on June 7 that a group led by J. H. Carpenter was completing Covington’s first course on the old Parrish estate behind the Presbyterian Church on Maple Street (now 175 N. Maple Avenue). Construction was “under the personal supervision of Mr. E. M. Brady,” and the course would have “night illumination furnished by batteries of high candlepower lights.”
The Cova Miniature Golf Course opened on June 10, charging 25 cents for 18 holes and offering “free instruction.” It averaged an impressive 350 guests over its first three days and quickly expanded its original 4:00–11:00 p.m. hours to open at 9:30 a.m.
Cova’s slogan was “Golf Without A Struggle.” Par was 42, but nobody came close in the first week. The low score was 47, by Carl Kesner, a member of the Westvaco Country Club golf team. In August, the course began holding regular tournaments, with prizes of $2.50 in gold for the adult winner and $2.00 in play tickets for the junior division.
In late August, Covington’s 15 best players competed at Clifton Forge’s new course at Commercial Avenue and Main Street. They had reason for optimism, having lowered the Cova record to 40, but they were smoked. As the Virginian reported, the Clifton course featured “mountainous approaches, tricky curves, and two holes, one calling for the use of a niblick [9-iron], the other for a mashie [5-iron].” Three Covington players and six Clifton players broke par, which was 49.
Covington got its revenge a week later, easily beating the Clifton Forge visitors on a Cova course newly upgraded with a tin loop-the-loop, a brick-surrounded chair, a dog-leg pipe, and a stack of duck pins.
As the weather cooled, so did the fever. A third and decisive match was discussed, but it appears never to have been held. In late September, Cova cut prices to 15 cents for adults and 10 cents for children and advertised “Economy Books on Sale.” Meanwhile, the Town Council set a special tax on “all miniature golf courses operating in the city,” to take effect in January. The Virginian never reported if the tax was collected.
Through the winter, the paper had little to say about miniature golf. In June 1931, Cova announced that the discounted prices were now permanent and added, hopefully, that the course “is again becoming very popular.” It was not to last. The argument over whether the boom was a passing fad or a permanent change in American amusement had been settled.
Newspaper editors had a field day. The Virginian suggested that explorers who did not want long trips “might try exploring the ruins of the abandoned miniature golf courses,” and later observed that “Our idea of an optimist is a pickpocket attending a convention of miniature golf course owners.”
In May 1933, the Virginian described Charley Van Stavern’s new flower garden opening on Main Street and remarked that “it has only been a few months since Florence and Caroline Jasper were operating a miniature golf course thereon and coining money on their investment.”
It is not clear exactly when Cova closed. By 1936, the Virginian was reporting plans of the Alleghany County Democratic Committee to build a new office “on the site of the old Cova miniature golf course on Maple Avenue.”
Too many courses had chased too few nickels. The Depression, which made the fad possible, also made it unsustainable. The floodlights went dark. Lots reverted to weeds, garages went back to cars, and the last of the 1920s-era crazes — after flappers, flagpole sitting, and dance marathons — expired of oversupply.
America would try the idea again a generation later, this time with better construction, brighter carpet, dinosaurs, and windmills.
