Travel Log: The Great Midwestern Road Trip #6
The Great Midwestern Road Trip Part VI: It May Be Corn, but It Ain’t Corny
[From June 4th to June 13th my family piled into a rental car and drove through eleven states straight down the middle of the country. This is Part VI. Click here to see all parts.]
Oh My Mitchell
Close your eyes and think of a Corn Palace. Go ahead, do it.
Got it?
If you’re like me—and unless you’ve been to Mitchell, South Dakota—or received a post card from someone else who has—whatever you pictured is probably wrong.
The first time I ever heard of the World’s Only Corn Palace was sixteen years ago. An old girlfriend had stopped there on a road trip with her parents and told me about how great it was. The name was evocative, and I imagined a Taj Mahal made of cobs and stalks or a Versailles filled rare and fine corn examples, but when she showed me a picture it wasn’t really either of those things. It was kind of a normal building with some Russian flare and corn nailed onto the outside.
I was a bit disappointed.
But I was a younger man then who didn’t know how to appreciate the simpler things in life and who had not yet discovered the joy of taking kids to ridiculous places and watching them be underwhelmed. (Like a dad joke you drive all day for.) When I realized we’d be on the right side of South Dakota for a stop over, I was thrilled.
Thomas obviously enjoying a chair shaped like a shoe! Don’t tell me kids would rather play video games all day.
And so we made the two-and-a-half hour drive from Webster’s pie, hairballs, and racists over the rolling hills to the World’s Only Corn Palace.
Next time they pick a theme, I suggest they run it by someone who speaks entendre.
Shucking the Mystery
Beyond what the Corn Palace looks like, you might be wondering why it exists at all. The short answer is that people are ridiculous. The longer answer is that we’re ridiculous in naive and sometimes surprising ways.
Apparently, the United States went through a heavy crop palace phase in the nineteenth century, which I guess makes sense because just like an inner-city classroom there was no TV or internet.
With a large swath of the country was suffering drought and famine, Sioux City thought this would be an appropriate time to flex. So they took a ton of their excess food and, rather than sending it to people in need, they made it into a large building that housed a roller skating rink. (Not kidding.) And boy were their britches proud. Just listen to this old-timey smack talk.
There are better pictures of the original Sioux City Corn Palace online, but it was less clear if they were in the public domain. Thanks, NYC library for this one!
“Saint Paul and Montreal have their ice palaces, which melt at the first approach of spring, but Sioux City is going to build a palace of the product of the soil that is making it a great pork packing center of the Northwest.”
Oh snap! Eat it, Saint Paul et Montreal! You aren’t half of the pork packaging centers of your respective regions, and if you ever start to doubt that fact, then just look up at our might crop edifice built to withstand all seasonal changes in the…
This just in. We interrupt this braggadocio to report that the mighty Sioux City Corn Palace, once thought impervious to all springtime weather conditions, has been destroyed by flooding. Our thoughts and prayers go to the many roller skaters affected.
And so it goes. The stars that burn the brightest, burn the quickest, but the the spark was enough to ignite imaginations across the land and crop palace started springing up throughout the midwest.
So the Corn Palace in Mitchell isn’t unique because it exists; it is unique because it remains.
So why did this run-of-the-mill corn palace become the World’s Only Corn Palace? (That’s their title, by the way, like so many roadside claims, I could not find a proper corn-structure accrediting body.) Well, I think the permanence is truly a testament to men being remarkably bad at knowing what will impress others.
Once while driving I heard an ad on some sports radio station: Fellas, instead of flowers or chocolate, this Valentine’s Day get her what she REALLY WANTS, breast augmentation. In that moment, I knew three things. First, that the ad would work because some dudes are complete idiots. Second, I felt sorry for those poor idiots who we going to fall for the trick. Third, I felt more sorry for their female significant others. I mean, what better way to say I love and accept you just the way you are than to propose radical surgery on the second floor?
But I digress. The point is, the world and history is fully of examples of men not understanding what people really want, and the Corn Palace seems to be no exception.
In the early 1900s there was some scuttlebutt about moving the state capital out of Pierre, South Dakota, and Mitchell came a courting. And why not? Mitchell was bigger than Pierre, was growing much more rapidly, and even had a university. And those are all pretty good advantages, but some folks worried it wouldn’t be enough.
Somewhere along the line some guy, or small group of guys, got a bright idea they thought was sure to seal the deal: Hey, do you know what will impress the legislatures? Do you know what every great and powerful seat of government wants? To be close to donors? To be tapped into local industries? No, what they really want is a more-permanent Corn Palace.
So rebuilding the Corn Palace—bigger, better, and stronger—is just what they did, which is why to this day the capital is still in Pierre and the Corn Palace remains in Mitchell.
That explains what the Corn Palace is, why it exists at all, and why it’s still around, but there is still one more mystery left to reveal. Close your eyes and try to imagine what is inside the World’s Only Corn Palace.
I had been thinking about it for almost two decades, and I wasn’t even close. Do you think there are lots of corn exhibits? Or maybe it’s filled with a sea of golden kernels that you can swim in like Scrooge McDuck?
It could be either of those things, but it isn’t.
The correct answer would be gift-shop retail racks rolled out onto a basketball court with one-half of an arena.
Corn palace interior.
When we walked through the front doors (for free!), the nice person who greeted us said the pre-tour movie had just started and gestured to a set of double doors. I’ve done this a lot, and normally that’s when you go into a small, semi-dark room with a handful of chairs or benches and a DVD player pumping out low-production videos with lots of fun screen wipes. Never have I opened those doors to reveal one-half of a stadium where people watched a film on an old score board.
Welcome to the Corn Palace!
It’s safe to say we all equally enjoyed the tour movie.
The Joke Was on Me
In full disclosure, I really did want to go to the Corn Palace, and I thought I would have fun there, but the whole thing was a bit of a joke to me. You know how there are movies you love because they’re great, and then movies you enjoy because they are so bad? I thought the Corn Palace would scratch the latter itch, but I was wrong. I really loved it, and most of that love was because of one man.
At this point you need to understand, the Corn Palace puts up new murals designed around a new theme every year (except in times of war, famine, or plum forgetfulness). From 1948 to 1971, artist Oscar Howe designed the murals and they were stunning.
A few of those how murals were preserved above the basketball court, and they were qualitatively different from all the other corn-based art we saw that day.
Prints of his mural designs hang along the hallways and they are bold, colorful, dynamic, iconic, and in general decades-before-their time. (I tried to get a picture, but the hallways were too dark and the tour was moving too quickly for me to adjust my camera.)
One of my favorite things is the idea that anyone can turn their vocation into art. I think it’s one of the way we can all make the world better. If you make sandwiches, make amazing sandwiches. If you provide customer service, then make people feel incredible. And if your lot is to make murals by nailing cobs of corn bisected lengthwise to a board, then make those murals stunning.
Thanks, Oscar Howe, for reaching through fifty-plus years by making things that would move me emotionally when I was finally lucky enough to stumble along your path. I appreciate it.
While I was busy being blown away by Mr. Howe, the rest of the tour was fine. There was a teenager who was polite and pointed at stuff, and I think he sometimes said things about things.
My main takeaway was that you might want to be careful when you visit. Since they make a new theme most every year, the murals are a little weathered in the spring and early summer, likely under construction in late summer, and pretty shiny and new in early fall, but I hear it’s worth a visit any old time of year.
Exit through the Gift Court
While I was busy learning important things like that, my kid was getting bored and kept asking when the tour (which couldn’t have been more than 15-20 minutes) would be over and we could go to the gift shop (gift court?).
Although I wish he was a little more patient, I’ve got to hand it to him. This is a kid who knows how to make the most of a gift shop.
Is there anything in modern life more likely to make a kid feel like he’s about to strike it rich than polished stones sold by the bag?
Three of us ended up getting Corn Palace t-shirts. We tried to get Maria to do the same, but perhaps the idea of t-shirt was too informal for someone who, in my experience, always wears a dress while she’s in South Dakota.
We couldn’t talk her into it, which is a shame because I love wearing my Corn Palace shirt and thinking how much I enjoyed finding a wonderful artist in what seemed to me like such an unlikely place. In fact, by coincidence, I’m wearing my shirt as I write this late at night.
Man in Corn Palace shirt writing while gift-shop boy sleeps.
And the Rest…
At this point I’m sure you’re wondering if there is a phallic mascot across the street, and you don’t need to worry. Yes, there is, and, yes, he is protected by 24/7 surveillance thanks to a Department of Homeland Security grant. (This is one cob you’re not gonna get your hands on, al-Qaeda!)
Meet Cornelius.
After all the fun, I was still on a bit of a Corn Palace high and wasn’t ready to get back in the car and drive away just yet. I talked my family into going into a small gift shop nearby.
It was great. It had all the things you’d want from a gift shop like rubber band guns, 1:32 scale die-cast cars, and right-wing t-shirts. It’s only real failings were, foremost, that it didn’t happen to be the Corn Palace, and, secondly, that behind the ice cream counter I saw one of the worst bits of interior decorating I’ve ever seen.
I would hate to see the Pinterest board this gem came from.
What, Colin Kaepernick kneels for human rights in front of a flag and people bust out pitch forks and torches, meanwhile this happens and we’re all just supposed to buy shot glasses and lick iced cream?
Ok, it was clearly time to go.
We crossed the street, got into our car, and bid a fond farewell to wonderful Mitchell. (Mitchell, I think I’d like you even with your make up off. The Corn Palace was amazing, but you’re good enough to be a South Dakotan capital without it.)
As the light started to get low in the sky, we worked our way toward Buffalo Ridge, which might have been my favorite place in the whole 2,000 mile trip.
