Religion has been intertwined with current Corn Palace's 100-year history

Sep. 17—EDITOR'S NOTE — This story is part of a series commemorating the 100th anniversary of the current Corn Palace building, which opened in 1921.

Over the last 100 years, the civic-centered Corn Palace has crossed paths with religion numerous times.

The connections with local religious organizations in the community were made soon after the building's opening in 1921. As the new facility was opening in September, local organizations banded together to purchase a pipe organ for the building, figuring it would get used for a number of community events, including religious events.

Plans for it were initially dropped during construction due to financial considerations but the Mitchell Philharmonic Club, in particular, said the building would not be complete without one.

In December, a community Christmas celebration was organized, with the Mitchell symphony orchestra holding a concert and the Mitchell Elks Club sponsoring a toy drive for admission, vowing to fix any broken toys donated so they could be given to children in need in the city.

In coming years, the Corn Palace regularly hosted services and musical performances around Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The Corn Palace hosted a 300-person Passion Play in 1930, depicting the trial, suffering and death of Jesus Christ. The performance was slated for two-and-a-half hours, with the request for no applause during the show. Holy Family Catholic Church sponsored a 1939 Palace screening of the French film Golgotha about the death of Jesus Christ, billed as the first talking motion picture of the Passion Play.

READ: More from the Corn Palace 100 series by Marcus Traxler.

In addition to weddings and funerals at the Corn Palace over the years, services expecting large Sunday crowds have regularly used the building. In 1931, as the South Dakota Education Association was gathering in Mitchell for its convention, the Mitchell Ministerial Association organized a Sunday evening religious service at the Corn Palace, with a sermon led by the head of the English department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1937, it was the site of Mitchell's community Thanksgiving service, with University of Sioux Falls President Warren Palmer Behan speaking about God's role in Thanksgiving. A handful of local pastors provided the invocation and benediction, the Mitchell Municipal Band provided the music and the state and national Thanksgiving Day proclamations were read.

First Lutheran Church celebrated its 80th anniversary in 1968 at the Corn Palace and Mitchell area Lutherans held their annual Reformation Day services at the Corn Palace in the late 1960s and 1970s, with seminarians and pastors speaking and reading scripture, and mass choir and brass ensemble accompanying the hymns. In 1977, 2,500 people attended the service. The Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls regularly held large-scale mass in the building in the 1960s and 1970s, as well.

At the request of U.S. Rep. Francis Case, the South Dakota Hymn Festival was created in 1950 and held at the Corn Palace. Case said he had witnessed a similar event in 1948 in Washington D.C. and wrote to Frank E. Lochridge, the pastor at First United Methodist Church in Mitchell, about putting a free event together, which drew about 1,000 people.

Lochridge vowed it would be a memorable day in the history of South Dakota Methodism. It included regional choirs ranging from Groton and Hitchcock to Valley Springs and Kennebec, and Mitchell's symphony performed, plus there were worship seminars for visiting ministers.

In the aftermath of the United States' victory in World War II, the Corn Palace was the site of numerous prayer services. On Aug. 16, 1945, the Mitchell Ministerial Association's joint service spoke to the importance of God in guiding statesmen to keep the world on the path of peace, Lochridge said.

Sending warnings

One-hundred years of history has included occasions of locals sponsoring events that warned the community about impending threats to local religious beliefs.

In 1950, the Zion Lutheran Men's Club sponsored a screening of The Sickle or the Cross, billed as a "full-length picture unfolding the coming of Communism against Christianity" at the Corn Palace.

One year later, the Youth Conservation Crusade brought the film Assassin of Youth to play at the Corn Palace on Aug. 31, 1951, billed as "a fearless and true expose of the racket in reefers, loaded cigarettes made from marihuana and peddled to school children," with a marijuana leaf and a smoking joint in the center of the advertisement in The Daily Republic.

On April 25, 1976, 18 Mitchell congregations and religious organizations — ranging from Baptist to Lutheran, Catholic to Reformed, Episcopalian to the Salvation Army — sponsored an event about The Unification Church and what its former members learned about the organization frequently referred to as a cult and nicknamed "Moonies" after The Unification Church's leader Sun Myung Moon

The Rev. George Larson, the minister at Mitchell's First Lutheran Church, said there had been an increase in Moonies activity in Mitchell.

"One of their goals is to locate a recruiting center in Mitchell," he said, calling the group 'anti-Christian' but recruiting under the guise of being Christian.

"We feel we can do without that quite nicely," he said.

In the year of bicentennial, this newspaper reported that Moonies were selling red, white and blue oversized sticks of gum and flags in Mitchell.

One church-led controversy arrived in 1933, when a woman was set to do a fan dance at the Corn Palace Festival, replicating the popular dance of the time from Sally Rand from that year's World's Fair in Chicago.

The burlesque dancer Rand wore a flesh-colored bodysuit and used ostrich feathers in her routine, but she was famously arrested multiple times in a day for what was perceived as indecent exposure. The Mitchell Ministerial Association protested the idea of a local fan dance but festival organizers said the first three days of fan dancing has already been contracted and they wouldn't cancel the shows, selling it as a sensation that was "extremely difficult and highly artistic."

An era of evangelism

The 1970s, in particular, brought on a time of evangelism at the Corn Palace.

Regional evangelist Lowell Lundstrom, who grew up near Sisseton, brought his gospel team to the Corn Palace in 1976 to tape a "Movin' Thru Dakota Country!" television special.

The South Dakota Department of Tourism recruited Lundstrom to film their special for the year in South Dakota, and about half of it was filmed in the Mitchell area at an estimated cost of $300,000. He said he wanted his hour-long special to include a rally "where the rural people are and I felt Mitchell would more fully portray South Dakota." At the time, Lundstrom's specials were broadcast by 150 stations around the country.

In his sermon filmed at the Corn Palace, Lundstrom spoke of five main points of what America needed at the time.

"What America needs most is first, a moral renewal; second, a re-establishment of the home; third, a discovery of the real reason for working; and fourth, a compassion for others. These needs can be met through the fifth point: a right relationship with God," he said.

That same year, Rex Humbard, brought his "Cathedral of Tomorrow" show to Mitchell for a show taping. That was when Humbard's show was at the peak of its powers, and Humbard's program was aired on 500-plus television stations. Within a few years, financial problems beset his ministry, forcing him to leave the church and retire to Florida.

This story was published with the research assistance of the Carnegie Resource Center in Mitchell, located at 119 W. Third Ave.