“Welcome: Get Lost.”
That sign greeted visitors to a 15-acre cornfield maze in Webberville Friday night.
In fact, getting lost seemed the primary point of entering the maze at 3770 Noble Road. Both farmer Mark Benjamin, 35, and his brother James Benjamin, 22, were sporting gray T-shirts with “Get Lost” emblazoned in red letters across the front.
The two created the maze this spring and celebrated its grand opening Friday.
“We’ve had a few church groups here to go through it (before it officially opened),” said Mark Benjamin, a 1986 graduate of MSU. “They were amazed. They can’t believe how huge it is.”
The brothers had been considering the idea for a maze for a few years before they began planning and building it earlier this year.
“This winter, I got out a bunch of graph paper and started connecting the lines, trying to figure out how to lay out the maze pattern,” Mark Benjamin said. “Then we had the figures and just kept erasing the lines and doing it until it looked right.
“Then in the spring after planting the corn, we went in and put in the flags, we laid out our paths, killed the corn and made the maze.”
The flags were used to plan where the paths would later be in the maze.
The maze boasts 3 miles of path and has a lighthouse, freighter, hot air balloon and sailboat carved into it. Several different options are offered for visitors who enter the maze for $5 a person, and completion of the maze can take from 45 minutes to an hour and a half.
“We spent many, many nights until 10 o’clock at night hand-raking the paths,” said Mark Benjamin.
“Too many,” James Benjamin said.
The brothers said they spent about 500 hours planning and completing the maze, which they said is the largest in the Lansing area.
Although there is no way to know the number of cornfield mazes in Michigan, Mark Benjamin knew of four others in the Lansing area and said there are hundreds throughout the United States.
“This is kind of a thing that slowly crept across the nation,” said Mark Benjamin. “The reason I’m doing this is because crop prices are low and land prices are high, and I need something to supplement the farm income.”
Steve Raymond, a farmer and Webberville resident, was among those who visited the maze Friday night.
Accompanying him were his two daughters, Brittany, 11, and Cassy, 12.
“The more money you pay, the more you’re lost,” said Raymond in frustration as his daughters argued about which way they’d already gone and which way they would try next.
“Go this way,” said Cassy to her dad as he responded with a sense of doubt.
“No, we went that way last time,” he said. “Remember?”
Even though the maze was fairly quiet the night of its opening, Mark Benjamin said he is confident more people will visit as autumn approaches.
“I expect I’ll probably have 5,000 people this fall until November,” he said.
The maze is open now until Nov. 3. Hours, directions and photographs of the maze are available at www.maze-n-market.com.
