Traveling through South Dakota along I-90 the other day, we saw a sign for 'The World's Only Corn Palace'.  And I'm like . . . well yeah. . .  I mean who needs more than one?  For those of you who have not heard of it, there's this little town called Mitchell that has the Corn Palace - a building which has existed in one form or another since 1892.  In it's current form it is basically the town community center - a huge building upon which have been build very fancy Turkish looking spires and columns with flags and all over the building are murals of different scenes revolving around a certain theme - and the murals are made completely out of . . . ears of corn.  And there are columns made of corn shucks (sic?) and so forth.  Huge.  Very elaborate.  Made out of corn.  7-8 different colors of corn.  It's amazing what you can make with corn.  And every year as the corn harvest comes in they tear all the murals down and make new ones. 

So what in the world possesses someone or a whole community to build a corn palace?  Well I did a little digging around, and according to the handy brochure I got (ok - so it wasn't much digging) when the Lewis & Clark Expedition went through the area that is now Mitchell they wrote in their journals that 'this is the great American desert, worthless for anything except for the buffalo to run on, no crops can grow here".  So 80 plus years later, the settlers of Mitchell, wanting to prove Lewis & Clark wrong and also entice further settlers with the promise of the fertility of the rich Dakota soil, built the first corn palace, a wood frame structure to which they nailed murals made with all the different kinds of corn that could be grown there. 

'Today all the corn is still locally grown, and by just tinkering around the farmer who grows most of it has developed 7 or 8 different colors to use instead of the original three.  So they can build a corn palace.  The world's . . . only . . . corn palace.