Chattanooga Regional History Museum

Chatanooga Regional History Museum features Tom Thumb Golf Exhibit

Chattanooga businessman Garnet Carter owed his success to thinking small. In 1928, Carter built one of the nation's first 18-hole miniature golf courses atop Lookout Mountain, near the border of Tennessee and Georgia, and founded a local attraction that would soon become a national pastime.

Today, more than 690 years later, the Chattanooga Regional History Museum is bringing that pastime to the present. A new exhibit, Putting Around: Tom Thumb Golf, A National Past-Time Sensation, will run until mid-summer.

The exhibit, the most construction-intensive ever built in-house by the Museum, features nine holes of Miniature golf open for play in two galleries, several of which are exact replicas of those first laid out on the lawn of the Fairyland Inn in 1926. The exhibit also includes photographs and text explaining the developments of Tom Thumb Golf on Lookout Mountain in the 1920s and golf artifacts from that time period.

Garnet Carter was a part owner of the Fairyland Inn on Lookout Mountain (now the Fairyland Club). In the spring of 1928, while waiting for a "real" 18-hole golf course to be completed nearby, Carter opened the miniature course.

The course soon became a major draw and in 1929, Carter patented his little course under the trade name of Tom Thumb Golf.

Information: Chattanooga Regional History Museum, 400 Chestnut Street, Chattanooga, TN 37402-4903; 423-265-3247; fax 423-266-9280.