Corn Palace

The Corn Palace is a multi-purpose arena in Mitchell, South Dakota, and is advertised as the world's only corn palace. Its walls and towers are covered with murals made of corn and other grains, and a new design goes up each year. It draws up to 500,000 visitors a year.

It is still used by the town for concerts, sports, exhibits and community events. Each year a citywide Corn Palace Festival is held, once at harvest time in September and more recently at the end of August, and the building is also home to the Dakota Wesleyan University Tigers and Mitchell High School Kernels basketball teams.

In the late 19th century, Great Plains towns built crop palaces to promote themselves and their harvests. From 1887 to 1930 at least 34 corn palaces were built across the Midwest, and only the one in Mitchell remains intact. The first one, built in 1892 as the Corn Belt Exposition, was a wooden castle meant to show off South Dakota's soil and attract settlers. It was rebuilt in 1905, when Mitchell tried unsuccessfully to replace Pierre as state capital, and again in 1921. Onion domes and Moorish minarets were added in 1937, giving it its present look. The domes were renovated in 2015 after they shook in strong winds.

The murals are replaced each year with a new theme. Farmers grow twelve natural shades of corn, and designs are transferred to black tar paper coded by color, a kind of corn-by-numbers pattern. Split cobs are nailed to the walls, about 325,000 ears and 1.5 million nails in all. Since 2018 the designs have come from Dakota Wesleyan University students; no new mural was made in 2006 because of an extreme drought.