How to Locate a Good Cornfield Maze:

I hope you get a chance to visit one of the hundreds of cornfield mazes. It’s difficult to tell which are good and which are not; so I will try to provide some help. I won’t make many specific recommendations, but instead, I’ll describe a general method for locating mazes. You might find some that are within a short drive from your home. They are only open during the summer, but if it isn’t summer now, well, it doesn’t hurt to plan ahead.

There are three companies that build these mazes in conjunction with the farmers who own the fields. The mazes are usually well done and come with food courts, other entertainments, and often some smaller mazes-with-rules. There are also mazes that are built by individual farmers, but, sad to say, they are usually pretty bad. However, if you’ve heard something good about one of these independent mazes, you should give it a try.

All of the three maze companies have web sites, and these sites are the best place to start a search for a maze to visit. Your search will usually take you to a page on the company’s site that has details about a particular maze. But don’t stop there. If you look around the detail page, you might find a link to a web site maintained by the farmer. The farmer’s site can be pretty interesting and it will usually have more complete information about the maze.

Here are the sites for the four maze companies:

The American Maze Company: This is Don Frantz’s company and he is the guy who created the idea of a cornfield maze (in 1993). The web site usually lists about 9 cornfield mazes, and most of them are accompanied by one or two walk-through mazes-with-rules. It was Don Frantz who came up with the idea of calling them “logic mazes” instead of “mazes-with-rules.” I designed most of these logic mazes, but a couple were designed by Andrea Gilbert and by John Taggart.

One of the mazes on this site deserves special mention. It is Cherry-Crest Farm, a few miles east of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Besides a huge cornfield maze and some logic mazes, they also have a crawl-through maze for kids, a petting zoo, farm tours, and even their own station on the Strasburg excursion railroad.
 

Adrian Fisher’s site: This usually lists around 14 mazes in the U.S. and Canada and many more in the rest of the world. Adrian is without doubt the greatest designer of large mazes. Some of them are pretty spectacular, as you can see from the picture below:

This was a maze of his at Davis MegaMaze near Worcester, Massachusetts. Note the bridge over a bridge. You can’t get any more complicated than that. Adrian’s mazes are often accompanied by small logic mazes that he designs.

The MAiZE: This lists over 190 maze sites. Many of them (in my opinion, the more advanced of them) are accompanied by my small walk-through logic mazes—called “Mini Mazes” here. If a farm has a Mini Maze, the detail page for the farm will have a cartoon like the one on the right.

Maize Quest: They have interesting-looking cornfield mazes, which are designed by Dave Phillips. You might remember him from the many Dover maze books he wrote in the past.

In addition to the cornfield mazes on those sites, don’t forget Maze Mania, the fence maze near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I still think it’s the best maze in the country. And also, don’t forget the Garden Maze at Luray, Virginia, a fairly large hedge maze.