Mitchell Has the Ultimate Annual Home Makeover

Every year around this time, the World's Only Corn Palace in Mitchell gets a makeover.

And when I say makeover, I mean they basically strip the outside of the building and start over. The building itself obviously stays put, but the entire exterior mural is replaced with a brand-new design made from corn, grain and native grasses. They’ve been doing this every year since 1892.

The theme changes every year, too. One year it might be sports. Another year it could be movies, South Dakota history or whatever the design committee decides sounds good covered in corn.

The mural designs are created by students at Dakota Wesleyan University, and then the real fun begins. Workers spend weeks attaching thousands of dyed corn cobs to the building in very specific patterns. From a distance it can look like a giant painted mural. Get close enough and you realize you're looking at thousands of individual ears of corn lined up like pixels.

And the Corn Palace isn't just a giant piece of agricultural folk-art.

Underneath all that corn is a fully functioning arena that hosts basketball games, concerts, graduations and other events throughout the year. Plenty of recognizable musicians have played there, along with countless Mitchell high school and Dakota Wesleyan University basketball teams.

It's easy to pass Mitchell on I-90 and think, "Yeah, okay, there's the Corn Palace," without actually stopping. To outsiders, the name sounds almost too ridiculous to be real. But that's what makes it worth seeing.

It's a genuinely bizarre piece of South Dakota history that the people of Mitchell literally rebuild by hand every year using crops that most of us normally just drive past.

If your last visit was on a school field trip when you were a kid, it might be time to give it another look. Because whatever it looks like this year, it won't look exactly the same next year.