Tag: davison county

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How Will the Corn Palace Look in 10 Years?

By John Andrews

Louis Beckwith would still recognize Mitchell’s Corn Palace if he were alive today. The corn murals, spires and flags are similar to those that adorned the first palace in 1892, built after Beckwith and fellow businessman L.O. Gale marched up and down Main Street and collected $3,700 in pledges toward its construction.

Unfortunately times have changed. Visitors aren’t coming in droves today like they did for the 1892 Corn Belt Exposition, for which the original palace (built two blocks further south) was constructed. Doug Dailey and the Tourism/Corn Palace Area Development Committee are trying to figure out how to reverse that trend. The solution might lie in a $20 million to $50 million renovation of the 90-year-old Corn Palace and the neighborhood surrounding it.

“We’re wondering if it’s starting to get tired and showing its age,” says Dailey, a Mitchell attorney who grew up in town.”Being from Mitchell, you don’t recognize the importance of tourism when you’re younger. I graduated in the Corn Palace, I went to youth wrestling in the Corn Palace, and every August there’s a weeklong carnival. There are a lot of memories for a lot of locals, but we think there’s memories to be made for people from all across the state.”

The current palace is the city’s third, built at the corner of Main and Sixth in 1921. It’s unique because not only is it a tourist attraction advertised around the globe, it’s also the city’s events center, hosting meetings, athletic contests and other functions. And that’s part of the problem.”It’s tough to host tourists with events and vice versa,” Dailey says.”We want to try to accommodate both.”

In the committee’s early days, there was talk of a”fourth generation” corn palace, an entirely new structure built in a different location.”But we recognized that the current corn palace is very iconic and recognizable to people worldwide, so we want to preserve the building we have now and improve it,” Dailey says.

In the short them that’s meant incorporating a historical video that plays regularly throughout the summer and adding Cornelius, a fiberglass corn statue outside the palace that makes for a good children’s photo op. But the committee has bigger ideas: added seating and better sightlines, green space, an outdoor stage, more parking and a return to the more ornate corn decorations found in early photographs of the Corn Palace.

“We think there’s been a change in tastes among tourists,” Dailey says.”The Corn Palace is something you can look at and appreciate its history, but people are more interested in ‘edutainment,’ a combination of education and entertainment. They don’t discern between the two. Right now there are less things for kids to do there. The Corn Palace itself is not really a destination. It’s maybe a stopover.”

Ultimately the renovation could include the Corn Palace neighborhood and the entire downtown business district. The committee is getting help from an architectural firm, and plans to hold a public input meeting Jan. 5 before concepts are presented later in the month.

Dailey equates a Corn Palace makeover to Sioux Falls’ Phillips to the Falls project that refurbished an area of downtown.”Everybody’s very proud of Mitchell and the Corn Palace,” Dailey says.”We want to get others around the state to recognize that it’s not just a tourist trap but something special.”

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Upstaging Mitchell’s Sculptor

By John Andrews

Coin aficionados know the name James Earle Fraser. South Dakotans should, too. He spent part of his childhood in Mitchell, where he molded pieces of soft chalkstone from a quarry east of town into people and animals. As an adult he designed the buffalo nickel that remained in circulation for 25 years.

I ran across his name in a book I’m reading called Double Eagle: The Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin. It’s about the 1933 Double Eagle gold pieces produced at the Philadelphia Mint in the weeks before President Franklin Roosevelt, attempting to avoid a nationwide banking collapse, banned the public from owning gold. Apparently only one has survived, and its tale is exciting enough to tell in book form. At least that’s what I’m hoping. I’m on page 60.

The Double Eagles were designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted to beautify American coinage. Fraser was at one time a student of Saint-Gaudens’ at a French art school. He was chosen to revamp the nation’s nickels, which until 1913 featured a Liberty head. But as it happened, Fraser’s debut was somewhat spoiled by rogues at the Mint.

All nickels minted in 1913 were supposed to carry Fraser’s design of an Indian head on one side and a striking buffalo on the other. But in 1919 a coin collector named Samuel Brown placed an ad in a magazine seeking 1913 Liberty nickels. Brown said he would pay $600 a piece for them. Later that year, he appeared at a coin show with five such nickels bearing the date 1913.

No one ever discovered with certainty how the coins originated. But Brown was a clerk at the Philadelphia Mint in 1913. One theory suggests that he and a cadre of cronies intentionally coined a handful of 1913 Liberty nickels, knowing they would become rare and valuable coins. Apparently it was fairly common in the Mint’s early years for employees to engage in such trickery.

The coins have gained value ever since. In May 2004, a single 1913 Liberty nickel sold for $3 million.

Buffalo nickels were minted until 1938, when the design was replaced by Thomas Jefferson and his home, Monticello. Fraser’s creations occasionally turn up, but you can see a sample of his artwork at the Dakota Discovery Museum in Mitchell. The museum houses his larger-than-life plaster sculptures of Lewis and Clark that he created in 1923.

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Wagon Master

A Mitchell area craftsman restores 19th century vehicles to their cowboy-era beauty

Story by Bill Markley
Photos by Greg Latza

Hansen (in red scarf) directs the renovation of a wagon wheel.

The morning was clear, bright and cool for August. A six-horse team pulling a stagecoach approached the Cheyenne River crossing. Other wagons and riders on the 2008 Fort Pierre to Deadwood Trail Ride had crossed the river and were waiting on the west side. More horse-drawn vehicles lined up behind the stagecoach waiting their turn. As the lead horses descended the steep bank, the two drivers momentarily lost sight of them. The horses shied from the swift-flowing current, turned to their left and began to climb back up the steep bank as the other four horses followed. The drivers tried to correct the situation, but it was too late. The pole snapped in two and the coach broke away from the front wheels as it was designed to do to prevent passenger injury. The horses pulled the drivers, still holding onto the reins, off the coach as it tipped over.

The horses and drivers were uninjured and the stagecoach crew fixed their vehicle with assistance from local ranchers. In less than an hour, everyone was back on the trail.

Hansen makes adjustments to a design in his shop. A high level of craftsmanship is used in every piece he and his crew creates or renovates.

“It was the real pioneer spirit,” says Doug Hansen, the stagecoach owner.”Because if your stage broke down on the trail you just didn’t crawl in a hole and die, you up-righted your stagecoach, patched it up and set it on the front wheels again.”

Due to Hansen’s efforts to revive the lost art of building heavy-duty wagons, three 19th-century vehicles traveled the Fort Pierre to Deadwood Trail on the 2008 ride. But is a lost art really lost if one man still knows how to do it? That question comes to mind at Hansen’s Wheel and Wagon Shop, a 30-year-old business near Mitchell that has become an international success by sending stagecoaches, prairie schooners and other heavy wagons to destinations as far away as Europe and Japan.

Doug Hansen specializes in restoring 19th century vehicles to their cowboy-era beauty. He learned the trade from his family; his mother runs a saddle shop and his father worked with wood and steel. His grandfather spent his boyhood in an uncle’s blacksmith shop when horses and buggies were the mode of transportation.

Hansen remembers the day when his mom brought home two dilapidated buggies from an auction sale and he felt the urge to fix them. His grandfather helped him repair the wheels and restore the wagons to their original condition.

Once he discovered his interest in making wagon wheels and other folk craft, Hansen began to read books, visit museums, hang around blacksmith shops and borrow tools from antique collectors.”I wanted to learn how to make things,” he says.”It has become my life quest.”

Wheelwright apprenticeships are next to non-existent these days. There’s not even an online tutorial.”Building heavy wagons is a lost art, and I’ve been trying to fill the gap by studying the work of the old craftsmen,” Hansen says.”As I take apart wagons for restoration, I examine marks on the metalwork and wood. It’s my passion to investigate, restore and reproduce their superior design and craftsmanship. I want to understand the joinery and the engineering. We are copying the work of the leading engineers of the 19th century transportation industry. In 1860 they were making top of the line vehicles, attuned to consumer wants and desires.”

Hansen found his niche in Old West wagons.”Any Amish community has a buggy shop, but they don’t build prairie schooners or stagecoaches. The stagecoach is an icon of the American West. It’s the most recognizable American vehicle throughout the world. Everybody wants one.”

He and 12 workers fabricate parts in a shop near the James River seven miles north of Mitchell.”Out of necessity we have become self-sufficient,” he says.”We take raw materials and turn them into a product. We are not buying stagecoach parts and assembling them.”

Doug and Holly Hansen are preserving a transportation legacy.

His wife, Holly, runs the office. The rest of the wagon-makers are in the shop.”We have our own blacksmith, wheelwright, coach-maker and upholsterer,” he says.”Each craftsman is a specialist in his trade.”

Two of the shop’s restored stagecoaches and a freight wagon built from scratch traveled with the 2008 Fort Pierre to Deadwood Trail Ride.”The freight wagon’s running gear is a restored Studebaker,” Hansen says.”I’ve built wagons 30 years and it’s taken me this long to figure out how the freight wagons worked because there is no documentation. There are no freight wagons in the museums. I studied historic photographs and bits and pieces of hardware I collected over the years.”

The variety of wagons is endless. Nineteenth century manufacturers produced hundreds of different vehicles for hundreds of different uses.”We rarely restore the same type of wagon twice,” Hansen says.

When not restoring old wagons, Hansen’s workers are busy building other vintage vehicles from scratch.”We can spend hundreds to thousands of hours on a vehicle,” says Hansen.”Sometimes we put as much time in a vehicle as a carpentry crew puts in a house — two thousand hours on some.”

Hansen and his team of craftsmen take pride in resurrecting, preserving, and passing on America’s transportation legacy for future generations to enjoy.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117. To view more of Greg Latza’s photos go to www.greglatza.com.