The Mitchell Corn Palace: An Annual Monument to Agriculture

Mitchell, South Dakota has a building whose exterior is decorated entirely in corn. Every year. A crew removes the previous year's decoration, applies new murals made from colored ears of corn, grain, and prairie grass, and the Corn Palace reopens with a new design for another season.

The building has been doing this since eighteen ninety-two. The original motivation was promotional: Mitchell was competing with other Dakota towns for residents and investment, and the Corn Palace was a demonstration that the soil here could grow enough corn to decorate a building with it. The demonstration worked as advertisement better than its creators expected.

The building is now a major tourist attraction in South Dakota, drawing hundreds of thousands of people annually to a mid-sized city on the South Dakota prairie that has no other particular claim on the national attention. The murals change theme every year and are designed by local artists, most recently Dakota Wesleyan University students. They have depicted South Dakota history, wildlife, sports events, and various other subjects that can be rendered in corn.

The building interior serves as a basketball arena and event venue. There is nothing ironic about the Corn Palace in Mitchell. The people who built it were serious about corn, serious about their community, and serious about getting people to stop and look.

They built something you cannot look away from. It is on Fifth Avenue in Mitchell, three blocks north of Interstate Ninety, and the detour from the highway takes about four minutes. Whether you stop or keep going says something about your relationship to kitsch, to regional pride, and to corn.