Dr. Greg Brick
My own introduction to subterranean Nicollet Island involved more travail than treasure, as a member of a roving exploratory herd on a cold, snowy night in the winter of 1989. One guy removed the lid, which was partly in someone’s backyard, and a big cloud of steam billowed out. We scrambled down the shaft into […]
The West Seventh Street neighborhood of St. Paul was also known for its breweries. In 1871, Frederick Banholzer acquired the North Mississippi Brewery, which had been established in 1853. In 1886, Banholzer Park, an outdoor beer garden, opened, buoyed up with balloon rides to Lilydale, across the river. After Frederick’s son William died, the brewery […]
Beginning as the Minneapolis Brewery in 1866, the Heinrich Brewery, as it came to be known, existed until 1903. The area was dubbed “Brewery Flats” because the Noerenberg Brewery (whose lagering caves are utterly inaccessible today) was also located nearby. These breweries, along with others, merged to form Grain Belt Beer in the 1890s, which […]
Here’s a free pdf of my 2009 article on Carver’s Cave/Wakan Tipi:
Here’s a free pdf of my 1995 article on Fountain Cave:
In 1700, the French fur-trader Pierre-Charles Le Sueur (1657-1704), while ascending the Mississippi River, described saltpeter caves along the west side of Lake Pepin, in Minnesota. This is the earliest record of cave saltpeter in America according to Shaw (1992, p. 52). Le Sueur’s Journal, under the dates September 10 to September 14, 1700, reports […]
Back in the 1980s, a friend confidentially informed me that he knew of a “huge old sewer lid” in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis and, peering down through the ventilation holes on that lid, he had seen deep into the bowels of the City. Although it smelled rather funky, he admitted, it sounded like there […]
Mushroom Valley’s nightclub era began as Prohibition (1919–1934) was winding down. There were two nightclubs here in the 1930s: Mystic Caverns and Castle Royal. A local mushroom grower recalled “the bumper-to-bumper cars that poured past here day and night to those nightclubs.” Oliver Towne called Mushroom Valley “one of the oddest night club belts in the world.” Mystic Caverns—not […]
Minnesota’s first brewery, which produced lager beer, was established in 1848 by Anthony Yoerg, in St. Paul. Yoerg, like many St. Paul brewers to come, was a native of Bavaria, the cradle of the German brewing industry. It wasn’t until 1871 that Yoerg moved to the location that was to be so closely associated with […]
Schieks Cave—aka Farmers & Mechanics Bank Cave—is the largest cave under downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. The otherwise excellent chapter on the cave’s history in the 1980 NSS Guidebook does not specify exactly when, or by whom, the cave was discovered. That information, however, is contained in the following newspaper clipping, slightly abridged, from the Minneapolis Tribune, […]
The Community Reporter is a monthly newspaper with a circulation of 12,000 serving the Fort Road neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2007, the editor invited me to contribute a feature about my investigation of historic caves under that part of town and the two articles that resulted were published in August and September. While […]
Chute’s Cave, in Minneapolis, operated as a show cave from 1876 to 1880 (conservatively estimated). A newspaper advertisement for Chute’s Cave, from the Saint Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer-Press and Tribune, August 26, 1876, is transcribed below. Although there are earlier newspaper advertisements for Fountain Cave, in St. Paul, dating back to 1852, they are very […]
The Greeks and Romans were fond of eating mushrooms collected in meadows and woods but it was not until about 1650, in Paris, that one particular species, the White Mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), was actually domesticated, or cultivated. (Other species had been cultivated in China many years earlier.) These cultivated mushrooms thrived on horse manure, but […]
Several years ago I corresponded with Dr. Howard A. Morris, of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, regarding the former U of M cheese caves in St. Paul, MN. Beginning in the early 1930s, the university rented two caves, one twice as long as the other, from the Villaume […]
I felt chagrined at one of the NSS conventions a few years ago, when, having just given a slideshow about St. Paul’s Fountain Cave in the Spelean History Session, a well-known speleohistorian (who shall remain nameless) got up to speak at the American Spelean History Association lunch meeting that followed. He referenced, among other things, […]
I submitted this story fragment for a literary contest in the Star Tribune in 2014. Who knows where it would have led?
The following clipping, from the St Paul Dispatch, December 3, 1913, is the earliest document I have seen regarding the mysterious inner room of Carver’s Cave. However, the discovery narrative presented therein is also of interest as the earliest Minnesota “trip report” to employ the rhetoric that has become so familiar in caving newsletters everywhere […]
A three kilometer reach of the Mississippi River gorge near downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, is known locally as “Mushroom Valley” because of the abundance of man-made mushroom caves in the sandstone bluffs. Mushroom growing lasted a century, from its introduction by Parisian immigrants in the 1880s until the last cave ceased production in the 1980s […]
“A great city is like a sieve.” Frederick Van Duzee As you walk the streets of downtown St. Paul there’s little to suggest anything special underfoot. It’s no until standing below the Mississippi River bluffs that you glimpse little holes in the cliffs near the Wabasha Street Bridge and see the magical “doors to nowhere” […]
I’ve been told repeatedly over the years that historic LaMoille Cave was destroyed by highway construction. This is a pernicious error, as anyone can discover simply by taking the trouble to visit the cave, like I did. But before I describe how this error gained currency, some of you may want to know a little […]