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Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Corn Palace, Mitchell, South Dakota

This is a very short stop if you are traveling across South Dakota on I-90.  The Palace is redecorated each year with naturally colored corn and other grains and native grasses to make it “the agricultural show-place of the world”. We currently use 13 different colors or shades of corn to decorate the Corn Palace: red, brown, black, blue, white, orange, calico, yellow and  green corn.  A different theme is chosen each year, and murals are designed to reflect that theme. Ear by ear the corn is nailed to the Corn Palace to create a scene. The decorating process usually starts in late May with the removal of the rye and dock. The corn murals are stripped at the end of August and the new ones are completed by the first of October.
It all began in 1892 (when Mitchell, South Dakota was a small, 12-year-old city of 3,000 inhabitants) when the World's Only Corn Palace was established on the city’s Main Street. During it’s over 100 years of existence, it attracts more than a half a million visitors annually. The palace was conceived as a gathering place where city residents and their rural neighbors could enjoy a fall festival with extraordinary stage entertainment - a celebration to climax a crop-growing season and harvest. It is really pretty cool.

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