Feliks Banel: The mystery of Washington’s first corn maze
Sep 13, 2024, 9:02 AM | Updated: Sep 27, 2024, 6:20 am
Lend us your ears for a kernel of truth, as we stalk the fields and archives in search of the Evergreen State’s very first corn maze.
The Apple Cup is this weekend – which is weird — because pumpkin time and harvest festivals are still a week or two away at various farms around the Evergreen State.
This tear in the time-space corn-tinuum has many people wondering about corn mazes and their history, so KIRO Newsradio’s All Over The Map team set out to find the earliest reference in local newspapers to a corn maze anywhere in Washington.
Using various databases, a corn maze was found in 1996 at Biringer Farms in Snohomish County. Several others began to appear throughout the late 1990s and into early 2000s, and those seem like the boom years for corn mazes.
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Going backwards, a corn maze was found at beloved (and now permanently closed) Joe’s Place Farms in Vancouver, Wash. in 1994. Then, one was found at Siemers’ Pick & Pack in the Green Bluff area of Mead, Wash., north of Spokane, from October 1993. This was the earliest corn maze the team could find in Washington.
A quick check of Wikipedia revealed that the first corn maze in the United States, or perhaps the entire world, was also first offered to the public in 1993. It was built in Annville, Pennsylvania at Lebanon Valley College, which was the alma mater of a Broadway and TV producer (and corn maze impresario) named Don Frantz.
Frantz’s title, as far as his interview earlier this week with KIRO Newsradio was concerned?
“The so-called ‘Father of the Corn Maze,’” Frantz said, chuckling deeply.
Frantz, who lives in New York City, says that in 1991, he was living in Los Angeles and working for Disney. One day that year, he read in the newspaper that 1991 had been declared the “Year of Maze” in Great Britain, in honor of all those ancient mazes and labyrinths made from laurel and privet hedges that dot the British countryside.
After that, the inspiration cascaded from there – almost like the plot of a movie or one of the Broadway shows Frantz has produced over the years.
“It kind of bothered me,” Frantz told KIRO Newsradio. “I was 40 years old and never been through a maze in my life” when he read about all those ancient mazes in Britain.
“That night, I saw ‘Field of Dreams,’” Frantz explained, that now-classic film about a man who finds meaning by building a baseball diamond in his otherwise humdrum cornfield.
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“The next day,” Frantz continued, “I flew across the country and looked down on the cornfields. And I grew up next to cornfields, and helping the farmer milk the cow. And thought, ‘Okay, I know how to make a maze that won’t cost me a fortune.’”
Unlike a film or a play, the corn maze didn’t happen right away. In fact, Don Frantz didn’t convince Lebanon Valley College to let him grow and design a the maze on the campus there until 1993. And when they did say yes, Frantz and the team he assembled didn’t wait until harvest time – they built the first corn maze in August.
Frantz said he built it by hand – no computers, no GPS helping a tractor navigate and cut the stalks for him. However, the maze was elaborate, in the shape of a stegosaurus named Cornelius the Cobosaurus and it was a colossal three-acres. It was believed at the time to be the largest maze anyone had ever built anywhere.
Not surprisingly, Cornelius the Cobosaurus got all kinds of national media attention and the story popped all across the United States.
As mentioned a moment ago, the earliest corn maze the team could find in Washington was at Siemers’ Pick & Pack in Green Bluff. Like Don Frantz’s corn maze, it was also in 1993. It all begged the question: is Don Frantz really the so-called “Father of the Corn Maze”?
The farmer behind the maze at Siemers’ is Byron Siemers. He’s 84 now and mostly retired, but he still lives next to his old farm at Green Bluff.
Siemer’s corn maze opened at harvest time in 1993. Siemers made it himself from a half-acre of corn he’d planted right next to his house as a test crop that year – with what turned out to be very tall stalks (perhaps as high as an elephant’s eye).
To settle the potentially sprouting controversy, KIRO Newsradio asked Bryon Siemers, point-blank, where he got the idea to create a corn maze at Green Bluff 31 years ago.
Unprompted, Mr. Siemers made it clear that Don Frantz’s title is un-corn-tested.
“It could have been that I’d heard about back east, that there’s a maze, they said the three acres, the biggest maze that they knew of,” Siemers explained. “But I just thought it’d be fun to make trails in through that tall corn.”
Clearly, Don Frantz’s maze in Pennsylvania inspired Byron Siemers to create his in Washington. Based on what evidence has been found so far, KIRO Newsradio told Byron Siemers that he should be known as the “Father of the Corn Maze in the Evergreen State.”
Siemers is a hard sell.
“Well, let’s put it this way,” he said. “I kind of doubt if I’m the first, but I know that I was near the first one. I thought over on the coast (of Washington), they might have had them before me, but I don’t know.”
If you have additional information about the history of corn mazes in Washington, please get in touch using the contact information below. Unless and until we hear otherwise, Mr. Byron Siemers of Green Bluff at Mead, Wash. will wear the Crown of Corn for the Evergreen State.
Siemers Farm’s annual Harvest Festival, with its historic corn maze, gets underway later this month at Green Bluff.
You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.
