Pt 70 – Fine Art of Metal & Corn

Saturday, July 20th, 2013

There was a parade going on downtown in Mitchell, SD, with dancing clowns, a hillbilly bluegrass band, an old cop car, and horses traveling along Main Street. We eventually cut through the crowd to check out the locally famous Corn Palace, which is exactly what it’s called. It’s a palace made out of corn.

The first one was built in 1892, just 12 years after the founding of the town of Mitchell. Early settlers decorated their agricultural bounty on the outside of the building in order to encourage immigrants to settle there, while also demonstrating how fertile the local soil was. Even the basketball court inside was decorated with corn cob art.

Mitchell was a little too corny for us (sorry, bad pun), so after a filling breakfast at Marlin’s Restaurant, we made our way to Montrose, SD to check out the Porter Sculpture Garden.

It was incredible! The artist was a little weird, but he was really enthusiastic about his creations and, as you can see, is extremely talented. This ended up being our favorite thing in South Dakota.

We made our next stop in Sioux Falls, SD which had its share of sculptures too, scattered around the city. Most of the towns we had passed through lately were small, rural, blue-collar towns, but Sioux Falls was a very modern city in comparison to the others we’ve visited in the Midwest.

We checked out some of the shops and searched for a place to grab coffee, a guy on the street showed us the way to a nice place that he was heading to called, “M.B. Haskett Delicatessen,” which had strong coffee and WiFi. We added the guy’s coffee to our tab as a thank you, then made our way to the state of Minnesota.