ARTery’s Ultimate Guide To Corn Mazes

Updated October 23, 2014

Greg Cook

Marini Farm's corn maze in Ipswich. (Greg Cook)

“If you took the maze and put it in a straight line it could be 8 to 10 miles,” explains Laura Ingalls of Marini Farm as she leads me into the Ipswich farm’s corn maze on a recent sunny day. I had made the expedition as part of preparing ARTery’s ultimate guide to local corn mazes.

Our guide below lists corn mazes within an hour or so’s drive of Boston. We’ve included some hay bale and hedge mazes because we love mazes, not just corn. And note that some mazes listed are just for little kids.

The origins of corn mazes are, naturally, somewhat confusing. Don Frantz is often credited as creating the first corn maze attraction in Pennsylvania in 1993. He’s a Hollywood entertainment guy, who has said his inspiration came from traditional English garden hedge mazes. But then there’s Adrian Fisher in England, who advertises himself as “The World’s Leading Maze Designer” and says he “designed the world’s first cornfield maize maze in 1993 and hundreds since.” Whoever started it, corn mazes took off on American farms in the early 1990s driven by readily available GPS technology (that helped people cut mazes) and farmers seeking extra income.

The result is that in fall many farms become makeshift amusement parks. At Marini Farm, they’ve got slides, a “sandbox” filled with corn kernels, a cannon that fires potatoes, a big bouncy pillow to hop on, peddle-powered go-carts, two corn mazes and rock and roll music piped in from good speakers. Many offer haunted hayrides, flashlight maze nights and even zombie (paintball) shoot-outs.

Being in a corn maze is much different from working out a maze on paper—because you can’t see the overall pattern. You know you’re doing it right when you’re overcome by the unsettling feeling that you’ll never find your way out. In 2011, when a family with little kids called 911 for help getting out of the corn maze at Connor Farm in Danvers as darkness fell, it became a national sensation. But maze attractions offer phone numbers to call and flags to wave if you feel especially lost.

As is common, an outside firm designs the maze for Marini Farm each year. Around July, guided by GPS, they cut the pattern out of the rising cornfield, and then keep the paths weed-free for the rest of the growing season. Come November, Marini Farm says half the corn used in the maze is used to feed livestock at another farm and the rest goes into biomass burners that heat Marini Farm’s greenhouses.

“It could take you 45 minutes. It could take you two hours,” Ingalls tells me as we wander among cornstalks in the Marini maze that stand a few feet taller than our heads. “If you want one clue, going over the bridges won’t get you out of the maze.”