Rochester, Minn.: Gone to seed in corny way
MINNESOTA | Towering achievements of art and architecture
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Al Whipple keeps his eyes to the skies and his ear to the ground.
Whipple is the legendary former caretaker of the Seneca Foods Corn Tower in Rochester. The tower, which holds 50,000 gallons of water, is the largest non-edible ear of corn in the world.
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The Rochester roadside attraction is 151 feet from the bottom to its red lights on top. The steel tower was erected in 1931 and went into production in 1932, the year Whipple was born. The corn tower provides water for corn and pea packs.
Rochester (population 100,000) is known for the Mayo Clinic, a minor league baseball team called the Honkers andthe birthplace of actress Lea Thompson. But everyone in town knows Whipple. His life at the tower is accented by the vanity plates on his GMC Canyon pickup truck that say "THE WHIP."
But does Whipple like corn?
"All my life," he said during a recent interview in the corn tower parking lot. "I grew up on a dairy farm about 20 miles north of here. I'm the youngest of 12 kids. I started here in 1950 as a seasonal, went to Korea and came back in 1957." Whipple retired in 1995 as plant maintenance engineer, and still watches over the tower.
Ironically, the Crop Artist Capital of the World is in Owatonna, just 40 miles west of Rochester.
Owatonna is the home of Lillian Colton. She is the subject of the recent book Seed Queen (The Story of Crop Art and the Amazing Lillian Colton) by Colleen Sheehy (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $24.95). Colton snagged a blue ribbon for her crop art portrait of Richard Nixon at the 1969 Minnesota State Fair. She died last year at age 95.
Colton's detailed use of seeds as a metaphor for life was why some called her "The Andy Warhol of seed portraiture." Colton used poppy seeds, grits and corn husks for portraits of Oprah Winfrey, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, among others. She made about 300 crop seed portraits in her lifetime, according to Sheehy.
"You could see her portraits and immediately recognize who it was," Sheehy said. "Which is hard to do in paint, let alone in mosaic form like seeds. Because she was a draftsperson and painter she could combine skills of modeling, shading and composition to analyze a photograph of a person and then translate that into her style through seeds."
During the Minnesota State Fair, nearly 120 pieces of crop art, including Colton's work, are on display in the Agricultural-Horticulture Building. The state fairgrounds are at 1265 N. Snelling in St. Paul. (For Crop Art competition information, call 651-288-4417; for fair information, visit www.mnstatefair.org.) This year's fair runs from Aug. 21 through Sept. 1, when cornball country singer Toby Keith closes the fair.
The Seneca corn tower is a fine photo op on the way to the fair. And it's still functional. For 10 months out of the year, Seneca produces cream-style and whole-kernel corn, mixed vegetables and more.
"If you go into your store for frozen peas, corn or whatever, there's a 90 percent chance it came out of here," Whipple said with a proud smile.
The Rochester plant was built in 1929 by the Chicago-based Reid Murdoch company. Original blueprints from Chicago Bridge & Iron may be found inside the tower. Just because the water tower was shaped like an ear of corn doesn't mean it was immune from the Midwest tradition of teens climbing the tower to declare mad love and other intentions. "We didn't put the fence around the tower until the '70s," Whipple said. "We used to climb up and watch the fireworks."
Scott Greer is a member of Leadership Greater Rochester and regional director of sales and marketing at the Kahler Grand Hotel. On a stroll through downtown, he said, "The corn tower is on the north side of the [55-acre Olmsted County] fairgrounds. We want to revitalize the fairgrounds, and Millennium Park is our model. There's a hockey arena there." Greer waved to a local newsman and continued, "Right now there's the flea market and the [Olmsted County] fair. But it is going to evolve in three or four years."
