Many people who live in and around Mitchell don’t really appreciate the Corn Palace. It just “is”. It’s the place to play basketball, or vote, or attend a concert or some other event but there is no appreciation for the history of the place.
I gave tours of the Corn Palace for a number of years in three different decades, beginning back in the 1990’s when Jim Sellers was the Corn Palace Director. Because I was “older”, at least in comparison with the high school kids who worked there, I often had the closing shift. In those days, the Corn Palace stayed open until 10pm Central Time. Many times, tourists would rattle the doors at 10pm, pointing to their watches with a “What gives?” expression on their faces and reflected in their gestures. You see, they had come from West River and hadn’t made the jump from Mountain to Central time so to them it was still only 9pm. Jim Sellers would invariably open the building, I would guide them through, and he would man the gift shop to get that last penny in tourist spending for the night.
Jim did that out of a sense of obligation to those people who wanted to see the Corn Palace and had come a long way to do so. He also did it because the City Council – it doesn’t matter the time period or who is on the Council – wants the Corn Palace to “pay for itself”. That’s an admirable notion but it doesn’t recognize that the Corn Palace does “pay for itself” albeit in an indirect, less obvious way and not just in the summer season.
When people come to town to see the Corn Palace and then spend money across the street at the Mercantile or at the Scoreboard or the Back 40 or stop into Walmart to restock the camper etc. that’s money the Corn Palace has generated. Obviously, that revenue will not be directly reflected in the Corn Palace bottom line gift shop and concession sales, but it is money that the Corn Palace has brought in off of the interstate that may well not have been spent in Mitchell otherwise.
That has been the major purpose of the Corn Palace since its initial construction back in 1892. The original Corn Palace was an all wood building 100 feet by 55 feet on the corner of 5th and Main. The Real Estate Association built and sponsored it in order to sell land. In 1892, the main real estate business was in farm land. So, a building was decorated in corn to show how easy it was to make a living in farming out here, the better to gull people into buying land. Anyone who knows agriculture can tell you farming isn’t “easy” but there were no laws against “false advertising” back then and a building decorated with corn was (and is) a great gimmick.
Add to the Corn Palace a festival of the harvest and now you’ve got a party. In 1913, as part of Corn Palace Week, Madame Cardona rode a unicycle on a high wire from the top of the building down to the street in front of a crowd of spectators there to watch for the same reason people watch car races, fully expecting a crash. She made it safely. Amble around upstairs at the Corn Palace and take in the designs through the years. The World War II years’ designs were painted on the Corn Palace and the corn that would have been used to decorate was donated to the war effort. Some years are missing due to drought or a misguided attempt to save money by making the designs “last” more than a year.
There were corn “palaces” and “grain houses” all around the upper Midwest but eventually they died out one by one. Some burned down. Most became too expensive and bothersome to maintain. The Corn Palace persevered and marched on.
The first building, at 5th and Main, was judged to be too small and so a second building was constructed at roughly double the size of the first at 6th and Main. That building was torn down when fire codes began to be a thing. The current building was constructed in 1921 at the present location to conform to fire code. That’s one of the reasons why the Corn Palace isn’t decorated from ground up anymore. The danger from fire due to dry corn and discarded cigarettes (remember the days when it seemed like everybody smoked?) was too great. So now the decorations start much higher on the building. It has the additional benefit of cutting down on decorating costs.
Ironically, while the concern about fire was understandable in those first two wooden buildings only the current Corn Palace has ever had a fire. It occurred in 1979 due to an electrical issue and did approximately $1 million in damage to the building.
When I was on the Mitchell City Council (2009-2018) there were those who wanted to get rid of the Corn Palace, if only metaphorically. Mitchell is the “Corn Palace City” and there were locals who thought that was hokey, outdated and a poor reflection on Mitchell. There were others who wanted to literally tear the place down and replace it with an “event center”, on some other site – bigger and better able to host a variety of events without all the cost of decorating and redecorating every year.
My response was two-fold. As far as branding and marketing, if Mitchell is not the “Corn Palace City” what is it? No imaginative, creative or even satisfactory answer was ever forthcoming to me from the Corn Palace City haters. I still think the current marketing slogan “Outside Expectations” is lame, but alas I have no better suggestion either.
My second question was, if there is no Corn Palace but merely an “event center”, what gets tourists off of the interstate and into town, especially when there is no activity going on in the event center building?
Mitchell used to have a Doll Museum that was located where The Mercantile is now. Mitchell also used to have a hot air Balloon Museum, located where the ACT is now. There was talk for a time about relocating the Dakota Discovery Museum to a downtown location but Jack Ewing, who was the President of Dakota Wesleyan at the time those tentative talks were held, nixed that idea proclaiming that the Dakota Discovery Museum would always be a DWU entity.
The Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village pulls people off of the highway and adds tourist dollars and sales taxes to the coffers of the city. They don’t get enough credit for that, but it truly is the Corn Palace that generates the vast majority of visitors to and tourist spending in our town.
The Corn Palace Festival is called that because it is no longer a week long. It used to be called “Corn Palace Week” and take place in mid-September. The midway ran from 12th Street down to 1st Street up and down Main. From 12th to 7th was the kind of thing that one sees at Dakotafest now, some farm equipment, a model mobile home and other similar types of displays. From 7th to 5th used to be more carnival attractions as opposed to rides; the man trapped in ice, the world’s smallest person – that kind of thing. The rest of the length of Main was taken up with the kinds of rides that one expects to see at modern Corn Palace Festivals.
When I first came to town in 1982, Corn Palace Week began on a Friday ran through that weekend and all the next week and concluded on the following weekend for a total of ten days. Carnival vendor schedules, conflicts with the State Fair as an example, and a desire to compete for concert dollars led to an early August start to the festivities and to a shorter schedule.
When I first came to town the entertainment was one act that ran for the duration of the first weekend and sometimes for matinees as well as evening shows. The closing weekend featured the Polka Fest.
For example, in 1982 I saw Red Skelton do his bits and he was hilarious. The Corn Palace was packed for every show. My recollection is that all of Red’s shows were sellouts, but it’s been 42 years and memories do get rosier with time. That changed as entertainers’ schedules became more compressed, venues and revenues in other places got larger and big name people didn’t want to spend a week anymore in a sleepy little backwater South Dakota burg like Mitchell.
The Corn Palace shows used to always be packed full of people and often sold out. That was before the Dacotah Bank Center (formerly known as the Swiftel Center) in Brookings was built, before the Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls and the Tyson Events Center in Sioux City existed. Performers would have a gig in Minneapolis or Omaha and be on their way to Denver (or reverse the process with entertainers coming from the west to the east) and stop off in Mitchell for a less lucrative show but still money in their pocket as opposed to dead time on the road. Those days are gone.
The Corn Palace can’t compete for truly big names anymore because of the limited seating. Why place the Palace at maybe 3,000 seats when one could perform at the Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls with a capacity of 12,000? I think events like “Battle of the Bands”, which is on tap for Friday August 23 at the Corn Palace, are going to become the norm for entertainment at Corn Palace Festivals going forward.
The Corn Palace began in 1892 as a way to get people to come to Mitchell and to, hopefully, spend money on real estate as well as to celebrate our agricultural heritage. It’s 132 years later and the Corn Palace is serving the same main purpose. It pulls people off of the interstate who then spend time and money in Mitchell. The Festival remains that link to past celebrations and agriculture continues to be a vital industry in the region and across the state.
See you downtown!