The drum major of the agricultural parade is corn, the Prairie Gold. Wheat, rye and sorghum have their boosters, but it's corn that fattens our hogs, sweetens our muffins and puts the starch in our shirt collars.
The needle of the corn compass points to Mitchell, a prairie town that is corn crazy and proud of it. Mitchell's high school sports teams are the Kernels. Its local radio station's call letters are KORN. And it's home to the "agricultural showplace of the world," the Mitchell Corn Palace.
The Palace, with its mad mix of onion domes and minarets, looks like it was drop-kicked out of czarist Russia. It was originally built to show off the fertility of South Dakota soil - and it's remained on the job, standing in downtown Mitchell for over 75 years. A rival "grain palace"
in Plankinton, 22 miles to the west, succumbed to the rigors of prairie weather decades ago. The Corn Palace, shrine to a superior foodstuff, has survived.
View of the Corn Palace, 1914. (Courtesy Mitchell Corn Palace)
Mitchell's Corn Palace is built out of reinforced concrete, not corn. Every spring, however, its exterior is completely covered with thousands of bushels of native South Dakota corn, grain and grasses that are arranged into large murals.
Typical yearly themes are South Dakota Birds or A Salute To Agriculture; this past year's was Youth In Action. Locals take great pride in the Palace's "corn-septual art" and "ear-chitecture." Mitchell isn't called the Corn Capital of the World for nothing.
The Corn Palace serves as a huge auditorium for touring celebrities (Lawrence Welk played here five times - a record), as a sports arena for the various Kernels teams, and as the locus of Corn Palace Week, the high water mark of Mitchell's yearly social calendar.
Corn Palace Week marks the end of the harvest - and the beginning of the planning for next year's Palace theme.
The Corn Palace has one more title - the World's Largest Bird Feeder. After Corn Palace Week ends and winter sets it, local pigeons and squirrels make a feast of the tasty murals.
Update - November 2007: The 2006 drought was so tough on local corn crops, that for the first time the Corn Palace skipped its annual redecoration. A set of mural themes paying tribute to everyday heroes was created for 2007, using all 12 natural colors cultivated in corn.
