Author Cynthia Clampitt, an Illinois Humanities Road Scholar speaker, will address that question, at 6:00 p.m., Tuesday, July 22, 2025. Volunteer Millers of de Immigrant Windmill will host this presentation at the Windmill Cultural Center, 111 Tenth Avenue, Fulton, IL. The facility is fully accessible to persons with disabilities. This event is free and open to the public; light refreshments will be served following the program.
Learn “How Corn Changed Itself and then Changed Everything Else.” Clampitt will demonstrate this concept through the history of common agricultural crops and foods, weaving stories of early America toward the development of the Midwest we know today. Trace how corn evolved from a weedy grass to the “cash crop” of the modern world.
She will present the history of corn and how it transformed the Americas before First Contact [with Europeans]; how it traveled the world after First Contact; its stunning impact on the creation of not only the historic Midwest but just about everything in it.
About 10,000 years ago, a weedy grass that grew in Mexico and possessed a strange trait known as a “jumping gene” transformed itself into a larger and more useful grass–the cereal grass that we would come to know as “maize” and then “corn.”
Most textbooks only mention corn in the context of rescuing a few early settlers, but it actually sustained the Colonies and then the early United States. Corn virtually created the Midwest, a region that settled faster than any other region in history.
It also created Midwest cities, especially Chicago, IL, where everything from grain elevators, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the 1893 World’s Fair, to time zones, and the stockyards were made possible by the golden flood flowing into the City.
The Illinois Humanities organization assisted with funding this program. If you have questions, please contact 563-2496115.
