Dr. Greg Brick
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]