Pull off I-90 in South Dakota and you’ll find a palace built from crops — no admission, no catch

It’s free and it’s on Main Street

You can pull off Interstate 90 about 70 miles west of Sioux Falls, park for free, and walk up to a building that looks like it belongs in another country.

The Corn Palace sits right on Main Street in Mitchell, South Dakota, and every inch of its exterior is covered in corn, grains, and grasses. No paint.

No dye. Just crops, nailed to the walls in giant murals that a crew tears down and rebuilds from scratch every single year. Around 500,000 people stop here annually, and admission costs nothing.

The story behind how it got here goes back more than 130 years.

At least 34 crop palaces once stood across the Midwest

Back in the late 1800s, towns across the Great Plains built crop palaces to show off their farmland and pull in new settlers. At least 34 went up in places like Sioux City, Iowa, and Plankinton, South Dakota.

Mitchell’s first version was a wooden castle built in 1892, when the town had about 3,000 people. The whole point was to prove South Dakota could grow things.

Every last one of those other crop palaces is gone now. Mitchell’s is the only survivor.

The onion domes came from a Chicago design firm

Mitchell tore down the original building and rebuilt it in 1905, partly to back a failed bid to replace Pierre as the state capital. The version standing today went up in 1921, designed by the Chicago firm Rapp and Rapp.

It looked plain until 1937, when workers added the onion domes and Moorish minarets that give it that out-of-place, exotic silhouette you see from the road. The building has kept that same look for almost 90 years.

Twelve natural colors of corn cover the walls

The murals across the exterior use corn that grows in 12 natural colors and shades, including red, blue, black, orange, calico, and green. Nobody paints a single ear.

A local farmer grows all of it specifically for the Corn Palace, and every color you see on the building came straight out of the ground.

Native grasses and grains fill in the borders and backgrounds, so the whole surface is covered from top to bottom.

A crew of 20 rebuilds the murals by hand each summer

The process starts in June, when workers harvest wheat, rye, milo, and sour dock for the border sections. Corn decoration picks up in late August once the ears ripen.

Artists trace their mural designs onto black roofing paper and label each section with a color code, like a giant paint-by-numbers made of corn.

About 20 workers then hand-pick each ear and saw it in half lengthwise to create a flat side they can nail to the wall.

More than 275,000 ears go up every year

Each round of murals eats through more than 275,000 ears of corn, about 3,000 bushels of grains and grasses, and 2,000 pounds of staples and nails. The corn has to hit a narrow window of moisture.

Too wet and it shrinks, leaving gaps in the design. Too dry and it shatters when you nail it.

Workers gather enough to last about three days at a time before it dries out. The 2026 theme is “250 Years of America.”

Past murals ranged from Allied Victory to outer space

Every year brings a new theme, and the range over the decades tells its own story. The 1943 murals celebrated “Allied Victory.”

The 1969 set went with “Space Age.” In 2025, the murals showed the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, and the Statue of Liberty under the theme “Wonders of the World.”

Old murals stay up until late summer, when the crew strips and replaces them. The building is never completely bare, so you always see a decorated exterior.

Oscar Howe designed the murals for over 20 years

From 1948 to 1971, the mural designs came from Oscar Howe, a Yanktonai Dakota artist and one of the most important Native American painters of the 20th century.

Howe blended traditional Dakota imagery with bold, modernist geometric forms, and South Dakota named him Artist Laureate in 1960.

A 2022 retrospective called “Dakota Modern” showed his work at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Since 2019, students at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell have taken over the designs.

The 3,200-seat arena inside hosts basketball and concerts

Step inside and you find a 3,200-seat auditorium that hosts concerts, graduations, and community events year-round. Mitchell High School plays basketball here, and the team goes by the Kernels.

Dakota Wesleyan University uses it as a home court too. Indoor murals and displays walk you through the building’s history and decoration process.

Free guided tours run during the summer months, and you can step onto an outdoor balcony and wave at the live “Corn Cam.”

Take a selfie with Cornelius across the street

Right across the street stands Cornelius, a six-foot-tall fiberglass ear of corn that serves as the building’s unofficial mascot. You will see people lining up for selfies with it.

The nearby gift shop sells corn cob jelly, buffalo jerky, popcorn, and other South Dakota-made products. Come back after dark and the building looks completely different.

Three color-changing domes and decorative lights make the whole structure glow against the flat prairie sky.

Time your trip for the festival or the rodeo

The Corn Palace Festival hits every late August with carnival rides, live music, food vendors, and produce competitions.

If you come in July, the Corn Palace Stampede Rodeo runs at Stampede Park in Mitchell, and it carries PRCA sanctioning. September brings the Corn Palace Polka Festival.

All three events have been community traditions for generations, and any one of them gives you a reason to build a trip around Mitchell instead of just passing through.

A 1,000-year-old dig site sits on the shores of Lake Mitchell

The Mitchell Prehistoric Indigenous Archaeological Site sits on the shores of Lake Mitchell and holds National Historic Landmark status.

The village dates to about 1,000 AD and once held an estimated 600 people, believed to be ancestral to the Mandan tribe.

You can watch archaeologists at work inside the enclosed Thomsen Center Archeodome, tour the Boehnen Memorial Museum, and kids can dig for arrowheads.

Over on the Dakota Wesleyan University campus, the Dakota Discovery Museum has Oscar Howe paintings and Great Plains history exhibits. Lake Mitchell also has 13 miles of hiking and biking trails.

Three future presidents stopped here on their way west

The Corn Palace sits right along Interstate 90, the main route for travelers heading to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, so Mitchell makes a natural stop on a bigger South Dakota road trip.

The building is a working piece of folk art that celebrates the agricultural roots of the Great Plains, and it has drawn some notable company over the years.

Three future presidents walked through those doors: William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Barack Obama.

Visit the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota

You can find the Corn Palace at 604 North Main Street in Mitchell, South Dakota, about 75 miles west of Sioux Falls Regional Airport along Interstate 90. Admission and parking are free.

Regular hours run Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended summer hours from late May through early September, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.

If you want to see fresh murals at their best, plan for October or November, right after the crew finishes the new corn art.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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