ARCOLA — People who attend this year’s Arcola Broom Corn Festival in September will get a good idea how the town’s new Broom Palace will look. At least the exterior. Pat Monahan, who helped to spearhead construction of the palace, said the outside of much of the building should be well along by the time the festival rolls around.
“They always do the (interior) finishing last,” he said. Graber Building Supply, the company building the palace, seems to be on schedule to have it completed by the end of the year, Monahan said. The palace is located at the corner of Main and Locust streets.
Monahan goes by the palace twice a day to and from work and is always mindful of the progress being made. “They’ve been real good partners and up to date,” Monahan said of Graber. The 45-foot-by-45-foot palace will be a permanent replica of a temporary broom corn palace erected for the 1898 broom corn festival, which drew 20,000 visitors.
The original palace stood for just five days and was not meant to be a permanent structure. The new palace won’t have the word “broomcorn” in the name since broomcorn is highly flammable and won’t be kept inside. The Libman Co.
, the Arcola-based company that makes brooms and other household products, will have a retail outlet to sell their cleaning goods on the first floor. Also on the first floor, a theater will include a film of how broom corn is grown and harvested, how a broom corn broom is made “and why broom corn brooms sweep much better than plastic brooms,” Monahan said. Hanging on the outside walls will be Sweeping Beauties — brightly illustrated, oversized fiberglass brooms.
Also featured will be the top brooms as judged from the festival’s craft broom competition that year. The second floor of the palace will be the site of the Arcola-based A Walk Through Time Museum, which has been closed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. At its former location, the history museum featured some of the things for which Arcola is most famous — Raggedy Ann and Andy, its sports tradition, military history, the broom corn history and The Lawn Rangers, who perform every year at the broom corn festival.
The palace’s third floor will be an observation desk. This year’s broom corn festival will run June 6-8..
