May 31, 2013: St. Joseph's Indian School
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Today is the last day we'll be spending in South Dakota, although Prudence and Ron will stay one more night with Guy. On this page, I'm going to include the description and our pictures of Guy's church- St. James Catholic Church. Then, we will all make a trip over to Mitchell, SD, to visit the Corn Palace. From there, Fred and I will head on home to Dallas while Prudence, Ron and Guy return to Chamberlain.

St. James Catholic Church

Before we left for Mitchell and the Corn Palace, I wanted to take a few additional pictures of Guy's church- St. James. You've already toured the rectory, but you haven't seen the church itself, so I'll bring together my photos from today and Fred's from earlier in the week.

St. James is a rather modern Catholic church just a few blocks from the center of Chamberlain. The complex is comprised of the rectory, the chapel, and two community center buildings that are attached at the right rear and the rear of the property. The chapel itself is more modern than most Catholic churches I have been in, and probably the best way to see it is via the movie I made. You can watch it with the player below.

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible) Inside the St. James Chapel

I was in St. John's church in Green Bay some years ago, and it was quite different from St. James, probably because it was much older.

There is not much I can say about the interior that the pictures we took don't reveal, so just use the clickable thumbnails below to have a look around the St. James chapel:

Early in our stay, Fred took one other picture just outside the chapel in front of the rectory; it was a rather good picture of Guy and myself, and you can have a look at it here.

After I'd taken my few pictures this morning, Fred and I headed off to Mitchell, following a few minutes behind Ron, Prudence and Guy who had pulled out just as I was taking my last pictures.

The Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD

From St. James church we drove south on Main Street to I-90 and then headed east.

Mitchell is about sixty-five miles east of Chamberlain, also right off I-90. We were following our GPS since we didn't have the others in sight. At Mitchell, we turned north directly into downtown, and simply followed the signs for the Corn Palace- which is the town's most famous and largest attraction. A little over an hour after leaving the church, we pulled into the parking lot to see Ron, Prudence and Guy just getting out of their car.

Actually, the aerial view of the Corn Palace is not all that interesting; I'd hoped that Google Maps would have its 45°-angle views available for Mitchell, but it didn't.

But you can see that we parked just on the north side of the building, and first walked across North Main Street to get good views of the facade of the building.

The Corn Palace serves as a multi-use center for the community and region. The facility hosts stage shows, as well as sports events in its arena. "The World's Only Corn Palace" is an outstanding structure which stands as a tribute to the agricultural heritage of South Dakota.

To get some decent pictures of the facade of the building, we had to walk across Main Street to a small shopping plaza.

The original Mitchell Corn Palace (known as "The Corn Belt Exposition") was built in 1892 to showcase the rich soil of South Dakota and encourage people to settle in the area. It was a wooden castle structure on Mitchell's Main Street. In 1904–1905, the city of Mitchell mounted a challenge to the city of Pierre in an unsuccessful attempt to replace it as the state capital of South Dakota. As part of this effort, the Corn Palace was rebuilt in 1905. In 1921 the Corn Palace was rebuilt once again, with a design by the architectural firm Rapp and Rapp of Chicago. Russian-style onion domes and Moorish minarets were added in 1937, giving the Palace the distinctive appearance that it has today. It costs $130,000 annually to decorate the Palace.

We did have some pretty good views of the building from across the street (and one from down at the corner). There are clickable thumbnails for some of these views at left. (The pictures would have been better if it hadn't been overcast.)

You might wonder why it costs so much money to decorate the building annually. Well, the reason is that most of the exterior of the building is made up of murals that change each year, and these murals are actually made out of different colored ears of corn that are attached to the outside of the building. The exterior corn murals (like the one of a duck, shown in closeup here) are replaced and redesigned each year with a new theme. (They can't leave the murals up for much longer than a year, since the ears of corn begin to deteriorate with the winter snows and spring rains.) The designs are created by local artists. From 1948 to 1971 the artist Oscar Howe designed the panels. Calvin Schultz designed the murals from 1977 to 2002. Since 2003, the murals have been designed by Cherie Ramsdell. No new mural was created in 2006 due to an extreme drought- one of the few times that the ears of corn from one year were not replaced in the next. But with the drought, there was little deterioration to worry about.

The Corn Palace in Mitchell was preceded by several other grain palaces including: a Corn Palace in Sioux City, Iowa that was active from 1887–1891; a Corn Palace in Gregory, South Dakota; a Grain Palace in Plankinton, South Dakota; and a Bluegrass Palace in Creston, Iowa.

In 2004, national media attention was drawn to the Corn Palace, when it received Homeland Security funding. This drew criticism of the Department of Homeland Security and its grant program. In 2007, the Corn Palace subsequently received $25,000 in DHS funding for a camera system. It was used during Barack Obama's visit in 2008, and, as reported by the Mitchell Daily Republic, to protect a " new Fiberglass statue of the Corn Palace mascot Cornelius" in 2009. This statue sits across Main Street, west of the Corn Palace, where we stopped to get pictures of the building facade.

Then we all went inside the Corn Palace. Basically, the building houses some small offices in the front, a room off to the north side that shows a film about the history of the building and an arena in the center of the building. This arena is used for basketball and for shows (when the floor is covered over). When not in use for either of those purposes, the basketball floor is given over to a souvenir shop (as was the case today). To give you a good appreciation for what the inside looks like, I climbed up to the highest row of seats to take a series of four pictures, which I later stitched together into the panorama below:

I sat up in the seats for a while, just taking in the scene, before returning to the arena floor and rejoining everyone.

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible) Inside the Corn Palace

When I got back down into the middle of the large gift shop, I thought I would make a movie to show you what it looked like from here on the arena floor; you can watch my movie with the player at right.

Surrounding the arena, high up on the walls, are more "corn murals," and some of these are left up over multiple years, as they are protected from the elements. In the pictures we took of them, you can more clearly see how they are constructed our of different colored ears of corn. I wasn't sure (and didn't ask) whether all the corn is its natural color, but the ears didn't look as if they'd been painted- at least not from where we were standing. You can use the clickable thumbnails below to see some of the pictures Fred and I took of these murals and designs:

When we were done looking around, we walked back to the building entrance.

There, I had Ron, Guy, Fred and Prudence pose in front of a wall sign in the lobby; you can see that picture at left.

I found out later when I was reviewing these pictures, that Fred had also found a couple of buffalo-themed art on the walls as he was moving around, and you can have a look at them using the clickable thumbnails below:

We stopped into the small theatre to watch the movie about the history of the Corn Palace, and during that movie became aware of the existence of a Carnegie Library here in Mitchell- which also served as the local historical society. So we figured we would go have a look at it.

The Library was only four blocks away, but since it was misting a bit, we took the cars over there. We found a handsome, sandstone building that was, sadly, closed for lunch. Apparently, the Library was no longer the town library; the sign on the gate called it the "Carnegie Resource Center," the name still honoring the steel baron and philanthropist who donated money for it and many other libraries across the country. Indeed, this library building is one of the many Carnegie Libraries that are on the National Register of Historic Places.

At the library, the five of us talked about what to do next. We came to the conclusion that Ron, Prudence and Guy would head back to Chamberlain while Fred and I, since we were already sixty miles into the trip, would continue on home to Dallas. So Fred and I headed off a bit further east on I-90 and then south on US Highway 82. This brought us back to I-80 right at the point where we'd encountered it five days earlier. From there, we just continued south, retracing our path home. By the time we got to Oklahoma City, it became apparent that if we just drove straight through, we could get home just after midnight, and so, after stopping for dinner, we did just that.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	May 31, 2013: St. Joseph's Indian School
	Return to the Index for Our South Dakota Trip