11-16-15
Story of the Week: The Forgotten Midwest Craze for Building Palaces Out of Grain
Rounduptags: Story of the week
The Forest City Flax Palace (Photo: Forest City Historical Society)
The first Sioux City Corn Palace (Photo: NYPL)
In 1890, Forest City, Iowa, built a palace–not of stone, or wood, or brick, but of flax.
There was, one visitor reported, “flax for siding and flax for shingles, flax for decoration outside and inside, on the pillars and along the rafters, on the stairs and overhead, pendant from the ceiling, a world of flax in all the devices possible to fertile fancy.”
The inventive structure in Iowa was not the only one of its kind. In the late 1880s, the midwest was seized by a craze for building palaces out of grains—hay, bluegrass, alfalfa, and corn, corn, corn.
These were fairytale palaces, rising out of the prairie like illusions and topped by towers, turrets and spiral domes. A grain palace might have a promenade three stories up, or a passage wide enough to pass a streetcar through. ...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Law Prof: If Recent SCOTUS Decisions Relied on Bad History, Opponents Need to Come Up with a Better Version
- How Hitler's Favorite Passion Play Lost its Anti-Semitism
- Fighting Back Against Book Banners
- At CPAC, Trump Presents a Violent Blueprint for Taking Power
- Mario Fiorentini (1918-2022): The Last Surviving Italian Partisan
- Revisiting Lady Rochford and Her Alleged Betrayal of Anne Boleyn
- Walter Russell Mead: Non-Jewish Interest Groups, not "Israel Lobby" Drive Hawkish US Mideast Policy
- The Architecture of the Shopping Mall Shaped by Racism, Surveillance
- The Misuse of History in 2021 Documentary "The Business of Birth Control"
- It's Hard to Be God