If you drive around southern Chester County, Pennsylvania, you start noticing something.
Mushroom farms are everywhere.
Not necessarily the kind of farms you picture when you think of Pennsylvania agriculture. You won’t always see a big red barn sitting in the middle of a field.
Instead, you’ll see long, low buildings.
Lots of them.
Those are mushroom houses.
And there are a lot of mushrooms being grown inside them.
In fact, more than 60% of the mushrooms grown in the United States come from the Kennett Square area and the surrounding region.
That’s a pretty impressive statistic for a place that, at first glance, looks like any other corner of southeastern Pennsylvania.
So how did this happen?
Well, like most good stories, it started with a guy trying something a little unusual.
A florist gets an idea
Back in the late 1800s, William Swayne was a successful florist in Kennett Square.
His business was growing flowers in greenhouses.
And somewhere along the way, Swayne apparently looked underneath his greenhouse benches and thought:
“We’re not doing anything with that space.”
Mushrooms, unlike flowers, don’t need sunlight.
So why not grow them underneath the flowers?
It sounds simple now.
At the time, it was pretty innovative.
Swayne sent to England for mushroom spawn and began experimenting.
The mushrooms grew.
And apparently they grew well enough that Swayne decided this wasn’t just a fun experiment.
It might actually be a business.
He eventually built a separate building specifically for growing mushrooms.
And that was the beginning of something much bigger.
Other people noticed
Here’s where things get interesting.
Swayne wasn’t the only person experimenting with mushrooms in the region.
Around the same time, other gardeners in Chester and Philadelphia counties were growing mushrooms beneath greenhouse benches.
And once people realized there was money to be made, the idea started spreading.
Why Kennett Square?
Part of the answer is simply location.
The region was close to Philadelphia and other large population centers where fresh mushrooms could be sold.
There was also an established agricultural community, plenty of farming knowledge, and eventually an entire collection of businesses and suppliers that grew up around the mushroom trade.
In other words, the mushroom industry didn’t just need people who knew how to grow mushrooms.
It needed people who could make spawn.
People who could prepare compost.
People who could build mushroom houses.
People who could harvest, pack and transport the crop.
And people who could figure out how to keep the whole thing running.
Before long, Kennett Square had all of them.
Then came the mushroom families
This may be my favorite part of the story.
The mushroom business became a family business.
Early Quaker families in the Kennett Square area—including the Swaynes, Darlingtons, Yeatmans, Phillips and Sharplesses—were among the pioneers of the local industry.
Then Italian immigrants began entering the business, particularly around the beginning of the 20th century.
Some came to Chester County looking for work.
Some eventually started growing mushrooms themselves.
And then their children got involved.
And their children’s children.
That’s still part of what makes Pennsylvania mushroom country so interesting today.
This isn’t an industry that appeared overnight because somebody built a giant factory.
It was built by families.
Generation after generation.
One mushroom house at a time.
Penn State gets involved
Eventually, growing mushrooms became complicated enough that farmers needed more than experience and intuition.
They needed science.
Penn State began conducting research on cultivated mushrooms in the 1920s.
In 1928, the first mushroom research facility was built on the Penn State campus, with additional funding from the Mushroom Growers Cooperative Association of Kennett Square.
That’s a pretty good sign that the little experiment that started decades earlier had turned into a serious industry.
Farmers weren’t just growing mushrooms anymore.
They were trying to figure out how to grow them better.
How to control diseases.
How to improve spawn.
How to manage pests.
How to improve compost.
How to increase yields.
And how to make a very unusual crop behave in a very controlled environment.
Penn State’s mushroom research program would eventually become an important part of the industry’s development.
And then Kennett Square became the place
Over the decades, the industry continued to grow and spread throughout southeastern Pennsylvania.
But Kennett Square remained at the center of it.
Eventually, saying “Kennett Square” and saying “mushrooms” became almost the same thing.
Today, Penn State describes the Kennett Square region as the center of the country’s mushroom industry, with most of Pennsylvania’s production concentrated in Chester and Berks counties.
The American Mushroom Institute estimates that more than 60% of the mushrooms produced in the United States come from Kennett Square and the surrounding areas.
That’s an awful lot of mushrooms coming out of a relatively small corner of Pennsylvania.
There’s something pretty cool about that
Think about the odds.
A florist in Kennett Square looks underneath his greenhouse benches.
He decides to try growing a fungus.
The fungus grows.
Other people see it.
They try it themselves.
Families build businesses around it.
Scientists start studying it.
Suppliers emerge.
New technology comes along.
And more than a century later, people all over the country are eating mushrooms that were grown right here in Pennsylvania.
That’s not just an agricultural success story.
It’s a local story.
It’s a family story.
It’s an immigrant story.
It’s an entrepreneurial story.
And, frankly, it’s a little weird.
Which is probably part of why I like it.
Because mushrooms aren’t supposed to be this big of a deal.
But here in Pennsylvania, they are.
Welcome to mushroom country.
We’re going to spend some time finding out why.
Sources: Chester County Press, Out & About Magazine, Vista.Today/The Keystone, 92.5 XTU, Pennsylvania Independent.