Corn Palace??

Yes folks, today we visited the world's only "corn palace"--a building decorated with various ears of colored corn in intricate patterns and designs on both the inside and out! Isn't America wonderful?

Each year since the early 1900s, the folks in Mitchell, South Dakota have been decorating a building and with the excitment culminating in a late summer festival at the corn palace. Lucky for us, early June is when they begin tearing down the "grains" portion of the current year's design in preparation for the new design coming with the summer harvest. This allowed us to see actual workers "building" (or in this case, tearing down) the corn palace.

The grains are ready first, and these sections should be replaced with a new design sometime in late June. The corn comes later with multiple species in a variety of colors making up the final design. Each ear of corn is apparently hand-picked and hand "trimmed" to fit the design picked for that year. Artists create the overall "blueprint" and the "corn staplers" put the corn in place. There are also a variety of murals on the INSIDE as well. Amazing.