The 2nd bucket list stop in South Dakota turned out to be a drive past the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. What is the Corn Palace? Today it’s a multi-purpose arena/facility on the main street of this growing city and is a premier tourist attraction.
In 1892, just 8 years before the turn of the 20th century, Mitchell was a small, 12-year-old city of 3,000 inhabitants when the World’s Only Corn Palace was established on the city’s Main Street. The city’s first Corn Palace was built as a way to prove to the world that South Dakota had a healthy agricultural climate.
Some 500,000 tourists come from around the nation each year to see the uniquely designed corn murals on the front of the building.
During its over 100 years of existence, it has become known worldwide and now attracts more than a half a million visitors annually. I’m not sure what I expected, but now I know what the South Dakota Corn Palace looks like.
Harvest Host winery
That night we had a spot reserved at a Harvest Host winery on a farm in the southeast tip of South Dakota.
Come to find out, the couple who owns the land and runs the winery came here in 1997 from the general area of where we used to live in California. They wanted their children to grow up in a more rural area like what they had known.
This ends our trip to the Dakotas, but we still have more to see as we travel home.
