Mushroom Mania in Mansfield
The morel of the story
By Kevin Howell
Photography by Ben Shadley
March/April 2008
The mysterious fungus grows in most parts of the country but in Indiana, solving its puzzle has become a rite of spring.
Welcome to Mansfield, in the heart of Parke County’s covered bridge territory. Although not alone in staging a mushroom happening, this hamlet hosts one of the largest morel festivals in the state.
Replete with mushroom auctions, mushroom sandwiches and backwoods mushroom hunts, the Mansfield Village Mushroom Festival has drawn visitors for more than two decades.
The first festival was organized by Greencastle-area residents Frank Hutchison, Jack and Shirley Dalton, and Pat and Terry McCarter, and held the last full weekend of April 1984. This year’s is April 26-27.
Second in Parke popularity only to the countywide fall Covered Bridge Festival in which Mansfield also plays a major role, the spring event expands the village’s population of about 25 residents to 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants.
“Obviously our county is really known for the bridge festival, which we’re a big part of, but as far as Mansfield itself, we have a series of festivals once a month except for January,” said Mary Beth Goff, current festival co-organizer, of her community on the banks of Big Raccoon Creek.
Late November and early December is time for the Christmas Festival. Maple Festival time is late February to early March. Bluegrass music fans show up in June. Woodworkers and whittlers get together in July. Watermelon and cornbread festivals highlight August and September. The Covered Bridge Festival falls in October.
Mushroom auctions are the most lively part of the festival (above right). The Mushroom Shack sells varios mushroom delicacies (above left).
SPRINGTIME IS SHROOM TIME
By spring, people are eager to get outside, sometimes regardless of the weather, which can be iffy. Despite that variable, Goff said the Mushroom Festival is by far the largest village festival.
“It is very weather-driven, with possible spring rains and all, but even at that our attendance is usually 15-20,000, and even in the bad years it does well,” Goff said. “But the thing we have going for us is it’s really at that time when everyone has spring fever and wants to get out as long as it’s not an ice storm or something really weird.”
Sometimes people have to wear coveralls and snowsuits when munching their ‘shroom sandwiches or bidding on bags of “rooms” that can go for as much as $50-60 per pound at the auction, but they still go.
Fresh mushrooms are bagged and sold; "20" means $20 a bag (above right).
WHY HUNT?
The village threw in a car show on the same weekend for an added attraction about nine years ago, but the main event remains the morel mushroom, or scientifically speaking, Morchella esculenta, for the common or yellow morel, and Morchella elata for the black morel, commonly called a merkel, sponge mushroom, or land fish.
“It’s a very popular festival and we attract people from several other states—a lot of the sellers for our mushroom auction come from as far as Iowa—and it’s definitely something people set their calendars for,” Goff said.
Tom Trueb, a rural Carroll County resident and avid mushroom aficionado, has been to the festival a number of times.
“The main highlight of course is just seeing a bunch of seemingly ordinary people who are gathered in one spot due to mushrooms, mushrooms meaning purely the morel mushroom,” Trueb said. “The festival is timed to the morel’s eruption, and the main event is the auction where the hunters bring their trophies to sell to the highest bidder.”
Trueb said the site is scenic, nestled in the rolling countryside of west-central Indiana with an operating mill and a covered bridge.
“It’s a nice getaway for folks such as us who want to spend a day away from the usual,” he said.
But what is the real attraction of this fungus that lives in musty undergrowth and cow pastures? What entices people to walk, stooped over, sometimes for hours, eyes glued to the ground, in unpredictable weather?
Goff said there is just something unique about the morel mushroom itself and its Hoosier connection.
“I think a lot of people associate that mushroom with Indiana, and I think everyone likes to hunt mushrooms for at least a little while,” she said. “A lot of people don’t want to stay out for 6 or 8 hours, but it’s fun to say ‘oh we’re going to go hunt mushrooms out in the woods.’ Generally after 30 or 40 minutes if people don’t find something they give up.”
Flavor and convenience are other factors. The morel has a unique flavor, and the festival makes hunting easy and fun. Organizers lease a nearby woods where participants can search as long as they desire.
If lucky enough to find an exemplary specimen, mushroomers can match it against others in the big mushroom contest.
“They can come, they can go on the hunt, then they have the option to buy some, and go have a mushroom sandwich—it’s instant gratification in a way,” Goff said.
A sizeable car show, viewed from a ski lift that crosses over a corner of the village, complements the festival (top left). The historic Mansfield Roller Mill in its current state (above right). Mushroom trophies await presentation as a non-mushroom themed band plays under the shelter house (above left).
EUREKA!
Perhaps what’s most distinct about the morel is that for years just figuring out how, why and where a mushroom will surface has been a mystery. They seem to show up in unlikely places at times—on sandy creek banks, under mayapple plants, around elm trees—in turn making cultivation as elusive as the mushroom itself.
Lafayette native and biologist Stewart Miller has found a key and patented his process. Miller studied biology at Ball State University and, being an avid mushroom hunter, began researching the fungus in 1972 as a biology teacher at Marion High School.
Although postulations have existed for more than 100 years about mutualism between fungi and plants, on his Web site Miller explains how he studied morel spores in culture media under a microscope to uncover the key to their life cycle.
After returning to his hometown, he studied everything he could find on morels at the Purdue University Life Science Library.
Twenty years of keeping detailed records and working in a makeshift lab at his home passed before the answer came.
“Without a doubt the mycorrhiza is the answer to this 200-year-old mystery. It’s a simple symbiotic pact between the fungus and the tree …” he wrote in his journal.
“Mycorrhizae” literally means “fungus-roots” and defines the relationship between specialized soil fungi, or mycorrhizal fungi, and plant roots.
Once he had the theory of morel symbiosis, it took Miller another 10 years to prove it was correct.
In 2002 he prepared his patent application and found that nothing had been written describing the morel fungus as being “mutualistic, symbiotic, mycorrhizal or endomycorrhizal.”
“Stewart Miller was the first to discover the secret of the symbiotic, mycorrhizal relationship of the morel fungus with trees and plants,” he wrote in a press release announcing his patent.
He was granted the patent in 2005 and recently began marketing morel-inoculated elm trees.
Stewart said that his discovery was a hit-and-miss process.
“I used to pick small morels and watch them grow in a climate-controlled lab at the high school, and subsequently grew the spores into fungal mycelium on culture medium.
“Each year I exhausted small steps during controlled experiments, which verified ways in which the elusive morel would not grow. Over the years until approximately 1994 and through the process of elimination I finally had my ‘aha’ moment with a microscope watching live morel hyphae and a live elm tree root.”
The bottom line, he said, is that the morel fungus lives inside the root system all the time, not just when the tree starts to die. It’s the death of the tree that prompts the morel to pull out and form a mushroom.
HUNTING STILL RULES
Stewart’s fungus findings continue to mushroom.
“I have had success in my small test plots beginning as far back as 1998, then in the spring of 2006 and 2007, I successfully cultivated additional morels.
“The larger test plots were just planted last year with American elm trees, which have been inoculated with the morel fungus and are still growing, reaching the critical morel fungus mass in the root system necessary to produce morels.”
Stewart said he continues to experiment and has “great expectations” for a 200-tree area this spring. Larger test plots have up to 1,200 trees on an acre.
“I am still discovering faster methods for morel production,” Stewart said.
Does knowing that morels can be grown in your own backyard take the fun and mystique away from finding morels? Not for the patent-holder, and probably not for others.
“My dad used to take me mushroom hunting in the spring,” he said. “During the last two weeks in April and the first two weeks in May we were going all of the time, and we went up to Michigan on weekends.
“Do I think that cultivation will take the place of mushroom hunting? Never!” Stewart said.
That’s because the fun is just getting out in the woods to walk and search, as if on a treasure hunt. Besides, cultivation takes years before a continuous seasonal crop develops.
Stewart said the tree has to grow to a certain age before the root system has a “critical mass” of fungus that will produce an optimal number of morels. As with any crop, weather, drought, insects and poachers often interfere with plans.
“Most people are too impatient to grow them,” he said. “Even though they taste the same, they would rather hunt them. It’s more exciting!”
The Mansfield Mushroom Festival is just the place to get that type of thrill.
Mushroom paraphernalia may outnumber acutal mushrooms at the festival; mushroom pride extends even to the allocation of parking spaces (above right). Vendors line the main street of the Mansfield Mushroom Festival, selling both mushroom and non-mushroom goods; that's Big Raccoon Creek in the background (above left).