The Year the Corn Palace Is New Again

The scaffold goes up around the palace in June, while the corn in the fields outside town is still waist-high and green. For a few days the building is just a building: a big block of brick and steel in the middle of Mitchell, South Dakota, wearing its onion domes and minarets like a hat that belongs to a more distant country.

Then the old corn comes down.

The crew strips the walls in panels, each one numbered to match a design that was drawn over the winter. A year of sun and prairie wind has turned the cobs brittle. The colors — red and blue, gold, orange, calico — have all gone the same weather-bleached gray. The birds have been at it since September. By June the murals are mostly texture, a memory of the picture they made in the fall.

The stripping takes a day or two. What is left is bare wall, and a smell: dry grain, sharp as feed, sweet as the bottom of a popcorn bag. The smell hangs over the block for the whole re-covering, mixing with dust and hot scaffold metal.

On the flat land of eastern South Dakota, a building like this has no business being strange. Strange it is, though. Mitchell sits where the railroad laid its tracks down the James River valley, among the corn and soybeans under a low, wide sky. The roads come in straight. The grain elevators are the tallest things for miles. And there in the middle of it is a palace with turrets, its walls about to be made of corncobs again, the way they have been made practically every summer for more than a century.

It is the last of its kind. The town could have stopped long ago and nobody outside Mitchell would have thought the less of it. Instead, year after year, it does the whole strange thing again. The reasons for that go back further than the building itself.

The Most American Kind of Boast

The reasons begin in the 1890s, when the Great Plains were still being sold. For a generation the land between the Missouri River and the mountains had been dismissed on maps and in guidebooks as the Great American Desert, a place no sensible family would farm. The railroads that crossed it knew better, or at least knew that their future depended on making others believe better. The towns along their lines had to advertise, and the one thing a prairie town had in unlimited supply was what it grew.

So the crop palace became a craze. Across the plains, towns raised exhibition halls and covered them in the harvest, then invited the world to come and see what the land could do. Iowa had corn palaces. The Dakotas raised palaces of wheat and corn. The message was blunt and American: if the soil can grow a building, it can grow a fortune.

Mitchell built its first Corn Palace in 1892. It drew visitors off the trains, and it worked exactly as advertised — people came, looked, and bought land. The town built again. A newer palace rose in the early years of the new century, and then the present building went up in 1921, of brick and steel, as if Mitchell had finally admitted it would be keeping this up for a while.

The others did not last.

A crop palace is a perishable thing. A painted building stands; a building made of food falls apart. Most towns tried it once and let the notion die with their faded corn. Mitchell kept the faith. The 1921 building was built to wear corn, designed from the start to be re-covered rather than preserved. That decision, more than the murals themselves, is what makes the place extraordinary.

The palace is not a monument. It is an act that happens to leave a building behind.

Following the Numbers

The design is chosen in winter and drawn on paper in a grid. Each square of the grid is a panel of the building's face, and each panel gets a number. The artist is a local — the way such things have always been done in Mitchell — and the theme changes every year.

Then comes the corn. The varieties are chosen for color: yellow field corn, red, orange, calico, a deep blue. The cobs are split in half and laid side by side, following the numbers, fixed to the wall in patient rows. From a few feet away, the grain reads the way paint reads. Up close, the whole picture dissolves into thousands of small arches of kernel, no two rows perfectly straight. It is folk art with a blueprint.

The work belongs to a small crew with scaffolding and a long, slow summer. Some are kids hired for the season. Some have been doing it long enough to know which harvests dry slow and which colors hold. They work through the hottest part of the day and into the long light of a Dakota evening. People on the sidewalk stop to watch, and the smell follows everyone home.

Then the festival comes, and the new palace is unveiled. Mitchell fills with people the way it did a century ago, when the railroads ran special excursions just to look at it. The building glows — there is no better word for what a fresh coat of blue and red and gold does to that odd architecture in September sun. The air over the street smells of popcorn, which is as it should be.

Then the year sets to work. The sun takes the color out of the kernels. The wind frays the edges. The birds of the plains find the palace before November and pick at it all winter. By spring the building is grey and ragged, patient, waiting for the scaffold.

Nothing is patched. Nothing is touched up. The palace wears its ruin openly, and then the season removes it.

Mitchell's high school teams are called the Kernels. They play on a gym floor laid down inside the palace, under the same roof as the murals. In winter, while the cobs fade outside, the bleachers fill with the town, and the building does what it has done for a hundred years: holds a community through the cold. It is an auditorium, a basketball arena, a fairground. The corn is not a costume the town puts on for tourists. It is the town wearing its own coat.

The Renewal Is the Point

The original argument for the palace has been gone a long time. Nobody needs proof that South Dakota can grow corn. The Great American Desert is a phrase on obsolete maps. A sensible town would have painted the murals once and saved itself the trouble. Mitchell declines, summer after summer, to be sensible.

That refusal is the real history. The palace began as an advertisement, and it has become something stranger and better: a performance of place. The town does not preserve its past; it remakes it. Putting up the new corn is the tradition, and the building is simply where the tradition lives.

The prairie does not keep things. A year's growth, a year's harvest, a year's snow and wind — none of it stays. The ground Mitchell sits on is made of that same cycle: growing, drying, weathering, growing again. A palace of grain is the one honest form of architecture the region could have invented, because it admits that nothing here is permanent. The only way to keep a thing is to make it again.

So every June the scaffold goes up. The old corn comes down in gray panels. A new design in yellow and red and blue is laid by hand into the walls. The man who runs the feed store watches from the sidewalk. The kids who helped tack up the cobs are back in class by the time the color starts to turn. And the palace is new again, as new as it will ever be, as brief as the year, and exactly as beautiful as a thing that does not pretend to last.

The scaffold comes down. The fields around town stand full and green, working on next summer's palace. And the cobs on the walls begin, very faintly, to fade.

Photos: Konrad Summers (CC BY-SA 2.0); Skvader (CC BY-SA 4.0)