With perfect weather and a great crowd, our 8th annual Putt Putnam County was memorable in many ways! This year we had 16 community built mini-golf holes lined down Franklin Street on Friday October 4th for anyone to play a round in downtown Greencastle, our largest number of holes yet.

With so many interesting mini-golf holes, it was hard to pick a favorite. We had a mix of new and a few popular holes from previous years – for this blog post I’ll mention some of the newest ones. But I will note Putt Putnam Virtually, last year’s hole simulator where you hit a golf ball down the streets of downtown Greencastle, was updated with obstacles on Washington Street – just like the real thing!

At one end was Greencastle High School’s Ghost Ship, a very popular multi-tier hole & perhaps the most elaborately built new one this year. On the courthouse end Putnam County Public Library had a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice themed hole.

The guitar hole also presented one of the toughest challenges this year – the guitar frets gave a bumpy roll. A last minute addition, Laser Alert!, had great visual effects & was extremely popular with the kids.

With 16 holes this year, there are too many to mention in this post so I’ll work on adding a slide show to the Putt Putnam County project page. And of course it’s not to early to start thinking about next year, we’ll have the 2025 event on Friday October 3rd. Start coming up with ideas now!

It’s still not too late to put together a mini-golf hole for Putt Putnam County. This Saturday from 9 am to noon, during Open Shop hours at Castlemakers, we’ll be building a mini-golf hole from scratch. We may even be able to help you build one for yourself/group/business for showing off at the main event on October 4th.

It’s a great way to see how quickly one can come together – we’ve built them before in less than 2 hours! But of course you can always overengineer things…

We’ve seen a lot of different mini-golf holes built for Putt Putnam County, now in its 6th year. Often questions come up about supporting the playing surface or the sides to keep the ball on the playing surface when building a hole.

We’ve got some general guidelines here, and you can always try searching the internet, but here’s some thoughts on what we’ve seen people create. Really almost anything will work, the piece of plywood with players laying/arranging building blocks at the event comes to mind, but for those that want to make something a little more complex:

• Many folks use 2×4’s or 2×2’s to raise the playing surface off of the ground to allow the ball to drop into a hole or cup. Do remember that people could be walking on the playing surface depending on your design.
• Others have kept their main surface on the ground, then have the ball hole higher than the playing surface.
• For covering the playing surface, plain carpeting or felt is common. But anything will work, including old fanfold computer paper printouts! Outdoor carpeting that looks like grass can be found and felt is available in the fabric department. Or just paint it!
• You’ll need to get the mini-golf hole to the event on Franklin Street Friday October 7th. Some have chosen to keep them light by using smaller or thinner boards for support. Many times it’s simply based on whatever wood is readily available.

We’re here to help you build that mini-golf hole, both with ideas and suggestions on construction and materials. Stop by during our Open Shop hours or contact one of us.