Lilydale Archives - Dr. Greg Brick

“Terrific Battles”: Pests, Disease, and Technological Change at St. Paul’s Mushroom Caves

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 […]

Lilydale Caves / Mushroom Valley

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 […]