History

The dispute began in 1946, when the Kranz Bluff Farmers Exchange and the Platte Hollow Grain & Storage Cooperative adopted incompatible schedules for deducting kernel moisture at the scale, a discrepancy known locally as 'the two-point spread.' Farmers took to hauling the same load to both elevators to compare tickets, a practice that clogged Highway 2 on harvest mornings and produced at least one fistfight, which the Kranz Bluff Beacon covered under the headline 'Words Exchanged at Scale.'

After two seasons of dueling lawsuits, both boards agreed in the spring of 1948 to submit the question to binding arbitration before Emil Voss, a retired district judge from Hastings. Voss heard eleven days of testimony on kernel density, dockage, and the calibration of a Steinlicht Model C moisture tester, then issued a unified deduction table now known as the Voss Schedule. Both cooperatives adopted it that August, and a photograph of the two presidents shaking hands across the Platte Hollow scale ran in farm papers as far away as Illinois.

The idea of a memorial surfaced at the settlement's fifteenth anniversary dinner, and the Joint Committee on the Corn Settlement Memorial was formally seated in 1965 with equal representation from both cooperatives, a condition that required the committee to have an even number of members and, consequently, a written tie-breaking procedure. The committee raised $54,000 through a voluntary quarter-cent-per-bushel checkoff and commissioned an Omaha foundry to cast the ear of corn in three sections.

A strike at the foundry delayed the topmost section, and the monument was dedicated in September 1968 at two-thirds height, capped with a temporary plywood cone painted to match. The full cob was completed and quietly re-dedicated in 1971. Postcards from the plywood era remain in circulation and are considered the more collectible.

Local Legends

Residents commonly state that the cob bears exactly 1,948 individually cast kernels in honor of the settlement year. The foundry's surviving records indicate the kernel count was determined by the mold, but the committee has never commissioned a recount, citing the height involved.

It is said that Judge Voss never ate corn again after the arbitration. His family maintains that he simply preferred peas, and had preferred them since before the war.

Some maintain the ear is oriented to point toward the Platte Hollow elevator in a spirit of reconciliation. The surveyor's notes on file at the county courthouse indicate it points at the parking lot.

The Controversy

Since 1994 the committee has been divided on what is locally called 'the patina question': whether the bronze should be waxed to its original finish or permitted to weather green. A 5–4 vote that year resolved that the lower twelve feet would be waxed annually, that being the reach of the county's ladder, and the compromise has been renewed without further discussion every year since.

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