urban cornfield {august 29, 2022}

Hello! Lend me your ear and let me a-maize you with a corny history lesson...There is more than a kernel of truth to this.

In Dublin, OH, a former corn field now sprouts 109 people-sized ears of concrete corn in a large oddball art display. This very weird sight along the road is a salute to Sam Frantz, an inventor of hybrid corns and former owner of this land.

Frantz farmed this site from 1935 to 1963, using it as as a study field for tasty mutant strains. Frantz was "well known for his development of hybrid corn seeds," and worked with Ohio State University on hybridization projects. (He obviously was crazy about corn. Does that make him a cornivore?) He donated this land, now named Sam and Eulalia Frantz Park, after its farming days were over.

The Dublin Arts Council brought in artist Malcolm Cochran to create the environment of corn. He completed this new field in 1994. A row of old Osage Orange Trees anchors the west side of the park, where you'll find signs explaining hybridization and describing the project. Three different molds were used to create the concrete ears of corn. The variety Cochran used is a "double-cross hybrid called "Corn Belt Dent Corn.”

The Arts Council wanted to remind residents of the area's long-gone agricultural heritage but the Field of Corn instantly became a shuckin' joke -- giant inedible food -- paid for with tax dollars, and surrounded by a sprawl of corporate offices, bland businesses and suburban neighborhoods.