The Corn Palace: Mitchell Decorates Its Walls with the Harvest

In eighteen ninety-two, the city of Mitchell, South Dakota was twelve years old and trying to prove something. South Dakota had only achieved statehood three years earlier, and skeptics in the East were still unconvinced that the northern plains could support agriculture. Mitchell decided to settle the argument by building a palace out of corn.

The first Corn Palace went up that year on Main Street, a wooden structure that cost fifteen hundred dollars and took sixty days to build. Its purpose was explicit: to demonstrate that South Dakota's soil could grow crops and that its settlers were here to stay. A festival was held each fall to celebrate the harvest. The event drew crowds from across the region.

By nineteen oh five, the original building had proven inadequate for the crowds it attracted, and it was replaced with a larger structure using the original lumber. That second building was itself replaced in nineteen twenty-one by the structure that still stands today, which later gained its Moorish Revival onion domes and minarets in nineteen thirty-seven. The nineteen oh five version was the first to feature exterior murals constructed entirely from corn and other grains. Native corn, grasses, grains, and wild plants were nailed to the exterior in patterns that created scenes, landscapes, and decorative designs. Each year, the murals are taken down and rebuilt with a new design.

At least thirty-four corn palaces were built in twenty-four midwestern towns between eighteen eighty-seven and nineteen thirty, built for the same general purpose of advertising agricultural productivity. Mitchell is the only one still standing.

The current building, a Moorish Revival structure with onion domes and minarets, draws more than five hundred thousand visitors a year. The exterior is replaced annually, using roughly three thousand bushels of corn in addition to other native grains, grasses, and seed heads harvested from South Dakota fields. It remains, as it was intended, evidence.