USA: South Dakota, Mitchell – Corn Palace

🌽 The Corn Palace – Mitchell, South Dakota

Blasting across the vast emptiness of the American mid-west is, it has to be said, not everyone’s idea of a good time. South Dakota is enormous, flat, and largely made of sky. I-90 stretches ahead of you like a grey ribbon someone’s dropped on a billiard table. But that’s precisely the sort of situation where you start looking at the map with a slightly desperate optimism, hoping something — anything — will justify pulling off at the next exit.

Mitchell, South Dakota, was that something.

The town sits about an hour and a half east of the Badlands, and it’s a fairly unremarkable sort of place — the sort of American small town that exists largely to service the motorists passing through on their way somewhere more famous. Population around 15,000. A handful of fast food joints. But Mitchell has one thing that no other town in the entire world can claim: the Corn Palace. Which is exactly what it sounds like, and also somehow not what you’d expect at all.

The whole enterprise began back in 1892, when a group of local civic boosters — and Americans of that era had civic boosterism in their DNA — decided the community needed a proper gathering place that also celebrated the agricultural bounty of the region. The idea was to decorate the building with native corn and grains, partly as a kind of harvest festival centrepiece and partly, one suspects, to demonstrate to the outside world that South Dakota’s soil could actually grow things. This was the Dakota Territory only a few years removed from statehood, and the whole area was still trying to convince settlers to come and stay rather than carry on to somewhere more hospitable.

The original Corn Palace did its job well enough, but as Mitchell expanded through the turn of the century it became clear the building wasn’t up to the task. So they knocked it down and built a bigger one. Then that one wasn’t big enough either. The third — and current — iteration was completed in 1921, by which point the town clearly had the hang of it. Then, through the 1930s, the building underwent another significant transformation. The architects reached, somewhat improbably, for Moorish Revival architecture — the style most commonly associated with the Alhambra in Granada and various exotic railway stations — and gave the palace its distinctive minarets, onion domes, and ornamental turrets. It is, to put it plainly, a building that has absolutely no business existing in rural South Dakota, which is precisely what makes it rather wonderful.

The real spectacle, though, is what happens to the exterior every single year. The entire outside of the building — and we’re talking thousands of square feet of wall — is covered in elaborate murals made entirely from dried corn, grain, and grasses. Different varieties of corn produce different colours: deep reds, bright yellows, rich browns, near-blacks. Local artists design new murals each autumn, and then teams of workers painstakingly nail individual cobs and ears of corn to the exterior panels, creating images of remarkable detail. Each year brings a new theme — Native American heritage, South Dakotan history, American life — and then, when the new season comes round, the whole lot gets stripped off and they start again from scratch. Which, if you think about it, is either a wonderful celebration of impermanence or an absolutely exhausting way to decorate a building.

The Corn Palace Festival runs each August, timed to coincide with the harvest, and the town draws somewhere in the region of 400,000 visitors annually. Arriving in August, you’d get the full spectacle: fresh corn murals gleaming in the summer sun, festival stalls, live entertainment, and the general atmosphere of a community genuinely proud of its peculiar claim to fame.

We, however, arrived approximately a month too early. The murals were there, the building was there, and it all looked very fine from the outside — genuinely impressive, in a slightly baffling way, once you accept the fundamental premise of decorating a public building with corn. But the festival itself was still weeks away, and the crowds hadn’t yet materialised.

And then we went inside.

I’ll be diplomatic and say that the interior is… functional. Very functional. Beautifully, comprehensively, almost aggressively functional. What we’d half-imagined — some sort of cathedral of corn, with vaulted ceilings draped in harvest decorations and perhaps a solemn hush of agricultural reverence — turned out to be a basketball arena. A proper one, with bleachers and a sprung hardwood floor and the faint, inescapable smell of all basketball arenas everywhere. The Corn Palace serves as the home court for the Mitchell Kernels (yes, really), hosts concerts, trade shows, graduation ceremonies, and community events throughout the year. Which is entirely sensible and community-minded and all the rest of it. It just isn’t quite what you’d been picturing.

Still. Outside, under that enormous South Dakotan sky, it’s genuinely something to behold. A Moorish palace, decorated with corn, sitting on Main Street in a small mid-western town that is otherwise entirely ordinary. America, when it decides to be peculiar, is really quite magnificently peculiar.