Corn Palace

In the late nineteenth century farm towns across the Midwest built palaces of grain to advertise their soil and draw settlers, and between 1887 and 1930 at least thirty-four corn palaces went up, Sioux City's famous ones among them. Mitchell's opened in 1892 as the Corn Belt Exposition, a wooden castle on Main Street on land given by Louis Beckwith, one of its founders. It was rebuilt in 1905 and again in 1921, this time to a design by Rapp and Rapp of Chicago, the firm known for grand movie palaces; the onion domes and minarets were added in 1937. Every other corn palace is gone.

The building is a working arena. Mitchell High School and Dakota Wesleyan University play their basketball inside, and it hosts concerts, graduations and shows all year. What makes it a palace is the skin. Each year local artists design a new set of murals on a single theme, and crews nail them up on the outer walls in ears and half-ears of corn in a dozen natural shades, with grains and grasses for borders and detail. The work goes up in late summer, and the birds of Mitchell spend the winter eating it.

The Corn Palace Festival in late August has been a town tradition for generations. Each year's theme, from history to rodeo to music, makes the outside of the building a running record of how the town has wanted to see itself for more than a century.