The World’s Largest Birdfeeder

With the major National Parks behind us, we faced a long and potentially uninspiring drive along a desolate I-90 through southern South Dakota, so we decided to focus our attention on the less well-known American gems (such as yesterday’s Wall Drug). Further examples are the 1880 town in East Belvidere (population 57)

and the Pioneer Auto Museum in Murdo (population 612) which boasts a motorcycle once owned by Elvis Presley.
We started to notice billboards every few miles that were beckoning visitors to “The Corn Palace” in Mitchell. With typical east coast snobbery, we amused ourselves for miles with derisive comments about the place. But – since we were looking for a pit stop anyway, our curiosity got the better of us and we pulled off the highway to check it out.

As the brochure says – “It’s A-Maizing” (we’re not kidding here).



The outside and inside walls of the building are decorated with murals made from ears of corn; the exterior murals are re-designed and re-“corned” each year.


The first Corn Palace was built in 1892 as a showcase of all of the crops that could be grown in the area. For more information, we recommend that you visit http://www.cityofmitchell.org/palace/.
By the way, we asked the obvious question as to how they keep the birds from picking away at the building and the answer is that they don’t – hence, the nickname you see in the title.

We made our way into Minnesota; Austin MN (population 23,314) is the home of Hormel Foods. Since SPAM is the most widely known Hormel product, Austin is also known as "SPAM Town" and accordingly has a SPAM museum.

We took a picture of the Hormel complex as seen from I-90 but chose not to stop because we were disappointed to learn that it did not include any murals made of SPAM.