Last Updated: September 11, 2026
Mitchell sits on Interstate 90 in the southeastern quarter of South Dakota, about an hour and a half northwest of Yankton, and it is known for exactly one thing: the World’s Only Corn Palace. That claim sounds like small-town bluster. It is literally true, and the reason why turns out to be the most interesting thing about the building.
This was the last stop of a long month — Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa and now the eastern edge of the Great Plains — and the weather had not finished with us. Sustained winds over 20 mph with gusts past 50, rain, and nighttime temperatures near freezing. We were still inside the country that produces spring tornadoes and we kept the truck pointed out, ready to move if we had to. That habit is the subject of its own post, Crossing Tornado Country in an RV, and this was the third campground in a row where it earned its keep.
Visitor Information: The Corn Palace is at 604 North Main Street, Mitchell, South Dakota 57301. Admission is free. Hours run daily in summer and shorten considerably off season, so check before you drive out of your way; phone (605) 995-8430, cornpalace.com. The Mitchell Prehistoric Indigenous Archaeological Site and Museum is at 3200 Indian Village Road on the south shore of Lake Mitchell, open seasonally with an admission charge, phone (605) 996-5473. Lake Mitchell Campground is a city-run park on the lake at 2300 North Ohlman Street, with 30 amp service; reserve through the City of Mitchell.
Mitchell, South Dakota
Mitchell has a population of around 16,000, which after a month of small towns felt almost metropolitan — and, more to the point, it had a Walmart, so we restocked properly for the first time in a while. That is not a glamorous reason to like a town, but on the road it is a real one.
The weather was miserable and we went out anyway, which is generally the right call. There is not much in Mitchell that requires sunshine.
Lake Mitchell Campground
The city campground on Lake Mitchell gave us 30 amp service and good water pressure but no sewer. It is small, there are no trails and nothing much to do on site — and none of that mattered, because the weather had already decided our schedule and the view across the lake was the best thing about the stop.
The birds made up for it. There were American white pelicans on the lake — the same species we had been watching stacked up in the tailwater below Gavins Point a few days earlier, still working their way north — and a belted kingfisher patrolling the shoreline. Kingfishers are one of the few North American birds where the female is the more colorful of the pair: she carries a rusty band across the belly that the male does not have.
There were a good number of osprey about as well. Lake Mitchell is a shallow impoundment on Firesteel Creek and it is full of fish, which is the whole explanation for everything with a beak in these photographs.
The World’s Only Corn Palace
Here is the part we did not know standing in front of it. Mitchell’s Corn Palace is not a one-off piece of prairie eccentricity. It is the last survivor of an entire architectural craze.
Between 1887 and 1930, at least thirty-four corn palaces were built across the Midwest. Sioux City, Iowa had one from 1887 to 1891. Creston, Iowa built one. So did Gregory and Plankinton, both in South Dakota. They were boosterism made solid — a town would throw up a temporary building, sheathe it in the harvest, and invite the railroads and the newspapers to come and look at how fertile the country was, in an era when settlers had to be persuaded that the northern plains were worth farming at all. Then the fashion passed, the buildings burned or were pulled down, and by the 1930s Mitchell’s was the only one left. It has been the world’s only Corn Palace by attrition.
Mitchell’s first went up in 1892 as the Corn Belt Exposition, a wooden castle. A second replaced it in 1905. The building standing today was finished in 1921 to a design by the theater architects Rapp and Rapp, and the Russian-style onion domes and Moorish minarets that make it look like a Central Asian caravanserai dropped onto a South Dakota main street were added in 1937.
Inside it is a working building, not a museum piece, and that is the charm of it. There is a stage and a basketball arena — Mitchell High School and Dakota Wesleyan University both play here — and the calendar runs to proms, trade shows, graduations, the Shrine Circus and a steady diet of touring music. A great many places would have turned a landmark like this into a ticketed attraction. Mitchell kept using it as the gym.
The Murals, and the Man Who Made Them
The exterior murals are stripped and redone every single year after the harvest, on a new theme. They are built from twelve naturally occurring shades of corn — no dye anywhere in the building — with rye, oat heads, sour dock and native grasses for the darker lines and borders. A full redecoration takes roughly 325,000 ears of corn, about 1.5 million nails, and as of a few years ago something on the order of $175,000. The indoor murals are changed on a far longer cycle, around once a decade.
And the artist who defined them is the reason this building matters beyond novelty. From 1948 to 1971 the Corn Palace murals were designed by Oscar Howe — Yanktonai Dakota, born at Joe Creek on the Crow Creek Reservation in 1915, a survivor of the boarding schools, and one of the most consequential American painters of the twentieth century. He took his degree at Dakota Wesleyan right there in Mitchell and served as its artist-in-residence, then became professor of art at the University of South Dakota from 1957 until his death in 1983.
In 1958 a national Native American art competition at the Philbrook in Tulsa rejected a painting of his on the grounds that it was not authentically Indian — too modern, too abstract. Howe wrote back. “Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting,” he asked, “that is the most common way?” That letter is a landmark. It broke open the idea that Native artists were obliged to paint in a style white curators had decided was traditional, and the field has never gone back. The man who argued it spent twenty-three autumns designing pictures in corn on the side of a building in Mitchell, South Dakota.
After Howe the work passed to Calvin Schultz from 1977 to 2002 and then Cherie Ramsdell from 2003 to 2017. Since 2018 the designs have been made by Dakota Wesleyan University students in the digital media and design program — which puts the murals back in the hands of students at the same small college where Howe took his degree and taught.
The pheasant panel is worth a moment. The ring-necked pheasant is South Dakota’s state bird, adopted in 1943, and pheasant hunting is close to a state religion here — but the bird is not native to North America at all. It is Asian, introduced to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and it took to the shelterbelts and corn stubble of the eastern Dakotas better than it has taken anywhere else on the continent. A state symbol that arrived from China, rendered in corn that arrived from Mexico, on a building in Moorish dress.
The panel celebrating a hundred years dates the set: the present building was completed in 1921, so its centenary fell in 2021, and that is what we were looking at in the spring of 2022.
The whole enterprise began as a way to mark the end of the agricultural year — a place to gather when the work was finished and the crop was in. It is still that. A building that is torn down and rebuilt in corn every autumn is a harvest festival that happens to have a roof.
What We Missed: A Thousand Years of Corn
We did not know this at the time, and it is the thing we would go back for. On a point overlooking the same Lake Mitchell we were camped beside, there is a village.
The Mitchell Prehistoric Indigenous Archaeological Site was a fortified settlement of around forty-five earth lodges, occupied roughly a thousand years ago by farmers of the Initial Middle Missouri tradition. They grew corn. They also grew beans, squash, sunflowers and tobacco, and they left behind bison-scapula hoes and knives cut for harvesting squash. It was declared a National Historic Landmark on July 19, 1964, and it is still being excavated — under a heated dome, the Thomsen Center Archeodome, where visitors can watch archaeologists work through the winter. The site was on Firesteel Creek before the creek was dammed to make the lake.
So: a town whose landmark is a palace sheathed in corn, and a mile away, on the same water, a corn-farming village a thousand years older than the town — worked by the ancestors of the people Oscar Howe came from and painted. We spent our time on the building with the domes. Go and see both.
Practical Tips for Visiting Mitchell
The Corn Palace is free, and it takes less time than you think. Half an hour covers the murals outside and the arena inside unless there is an event on. Treat it as a stop rather than a destination — but do walk the full length of the exterior, because the panels wrap around and the best ones are rarely the ones facing Main Street.
Go in late summer or fall to see fresh murals. The new designs go up after the corn comes in, usually finished by late August or September, and then weather all year. By spring — which is when we were there — they have been through a Dakota winter and the colors have faded and the birds and squirrels have been at them. That has its own charm, but if you want them bright, come in autumn.
Check whether anything is booked before you go in. It is a working arena. A basketball game, a graduation or a trade show can close the floor, and the schedule is on the city website. Conversely, if a concert lines up with your dates, seeing a show inside a building made of corn is a better story than seeing it empty.
Give the Indigenous village an hour, and check the season. The archaeological site and museum on Lake Mitchell run seasonal hours and are not open year round. It is a short drive from the Corn Palace and it is the other half of the story.
Lake Mitchell Campground has no sewer. Thirty amp, good water, and a dump station rather than full hookups — fine for a few nights, and the lakeside sites are genuinely good. Book ahead in summer; it is small and local.
Take the wind seriously here even when there is no storm warning. Twenty sustained with fifty-mile gusts is an ordinary spring day on this part of the plains. Point the rig into it if you can choose your site, get the awning in and leave it in, and do not plan to cook outside.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it the world’s only Corn Palace? Because the others are gone. At least thirty-four corn palaces were built across the Midwest between 1887 and 1930 — Sioux City and Creston in Iowa, Gregory and Plankinton in South Dakota, and many more — as temporary advertisements for the fertility of the northern plains. They burned, fell down or were dismantled when the fashion passed. Mitchell’s is the only one that survived, and it is now the last example of a vanished building type.
Is the Corn Palace really made of corn? The building is brick and steel; the decoration is real. The murals covering the outside are made from twelve naturally occurring shades of corn — nothing dyed — along with rye, oat heads, sour dock and native grasses, nailed ear by ear onto the facade. A full redecoration uses roughly 325,000 ears and about 1.5 million nails, and it is done over again every year.
How much does the Corn Palace cost to visit? Nothing. Admission is free. Hours are long in summer and much shorter off season, and the arena floor can be closed for events, so check the schedule before making a detour.
Who designs the Corn Palace murals? Since 2018, students in the digital media and design program at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell. Before them, Cherie Ramsdell from 2003 to 2017 and Calvin Schultz from 1977 to 2002. From 1948 to 1971 the designer was Oscar Howe, the Yanktonai Dakota painter who later became one of the most influential Native American artists of the century.
Who was Oscar Howe? A Yanktonai Dakota artist, born in 1915 on the Crow Creek Reservation and educated at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, where he was also artist-in-residence. He taught at the University of South Dakota from 1957 until his death in 1983. In 1958, after the Philbrook in Tulsa rejected one of his paintings as insufficiently “Indian,” he wrote a protest that helped break the requirement that Native artists work only in styles outsiders considered traditional. He designed the Corn Palace murals for twenty-three years.
Is there anything else to do in Mitchell, South Dakota? Yes, and it is better than the Corn Palace deserves. The Mitchell Prehistoric Indigenous Archaeological Site on Lake Mitchell preserves a farming village of about forty-five earth lodges occupied around a thousand years ago, a National Historic Landmark since 1964, with an enclosed dome where you can watch the excavation in progress. Lake Mitchell itself is good for pelicans, osprey and kingfishers.
When is the best time to visit Mitchell? Late summer through October. The new murals are fresh, the weather is settled, the pheasant country around the town is at its best, and you avoid both the spring wind and the deep cold. Spring is perfectly workable — we did it — but expect weather and faded corn.
From Mitchell we kept going west, out of the corn country and into the Badlands at Interior, South Dakota.
