Among the Kansas agricultural exhibits at the Philadelphia centennial was some corn on the stalks grown in the Neosho river bottoms. It was twenty feet high and the ears looked as long as stove wood.
    An old lady from Vermont gazed at it and declared that the stalks were spliced. Then she took another look and changed her mind. “But,” she said, “it didn't grow that big in one year. It must have grown for two seasons.”
    The man in charge of the Kansas exhibit was somewhat of a prevaricator himself. “Lady,” said he in great sole emnity, “we are almost ashamed to exhibit this corn. This has been a hot dry year in Kansas, and we have not been able to raise very large corn. But we felt that it wouldn’t do to have a Kansas exhibit without corn, so we brought this little stuff along. In a really good year the corn rows so high in Kansas that eagles build their nests in the tassels; knowing full well that they are out of range of the farmers’ guns.”—Kansas City Journal.

From— The Ward County Independent. (Minot, Ward County, N.D.), 20 March 1913.. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.