“How corn changed itself and then changed everything else”

MENDOTA – Mendota Museum & Historical Society will host a presentation entitled “How Corn Changed Itself and then Changed Everything Else” with award-winning writer, author and speaker Cynthia A. Clampitt at their 2019 season opening event on March 3 at 1 p.m. The program is free and open to the public, although donations will be accepted at the door.

Illinois history is corn history/ Yet, many Illinoisans have little direct experience with the sources of their food and the people who produce it. Although American history textbooks mention corn only in the context of rescuing early European settlers, it sustained the colonies and then, the early United States. It then virtually created the Midwest, a region settled faster than any other in history. Illinois was built on corn and continues to be sustained by it. At present, Illinois is the second largest corn growing state in the nation. Even if you think you know corn well, there is much to learn about its historic impact, and why it is so vital today.

About 10,000 years ago, a weedy grass growing in Mexico possessed of 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. Nurtured by Native Americans, this grain would transform the Americas even before first contact. After first contact, it spanned the globe, but it also drove westward expansion in North America, building cities and inspiring innovators and entrepreneurs. However, vampires, whiskey, Henry Ford, time zones, Fritos, and the Chicago Bears are also part of this remarkable story. And, as Margaret Visser noted in Much Depends on Dinner, “Without corn, North America—and most particularly modern, technological North America—is inconceivable.”

Cynthia Clampitt is a writer and food historian. She is the author of Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland, published by the University of Illinois Press and Pigs, Pork, and Heartland Hogs: From Wild Boar to Baconfest, published by Rowman & Littlefield. Clampitt has written for three decades about food history, but has also written more traditional history and geography for clients that include the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and National Geographic Learning. Clampitt is a member of the Society of Women Geographers, Culinary Historians of Chicago, the Agricultural History Society, the Association of Food Journalists, and the Midwestern History Association.

This program is made possible through the Illinois Humanities Road Scholars Bureau.  The Hume-Carnegie Museum is located at 901 Washington St. in Mendota.