In the 16th century, mushrooms were grown in France on prepared manure in caves outside Paris. France’s expertise in mushroom culture spread to England, and then to America. As late as 1900, Americans who wanted to grow mushrooms needed to buy inoculated compost bricks from England. This process was unreliable and the imported compost bricks produced a mixture of mushroom strains.

In 1903 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Louis F. Lambert created a product called "Lambert’s pure culture spawn." His spawn was sold to the farmers who grew mushrooms in caves above the Missouri River. This was a revolutionary development because growers could reliably produce a single strain of mushrooms instead of the mixture they got if they used the imported English spawn. By 1907, Lambert’s American Spawn Company in St. Paul, Minnesota, was marketing at least seven different pure Agaricus strains to growers around the country.

The idea of growing pure strains was a boon to the mushroom farmers, but it worried Lambert as early as 1908. He was concerned that the genetic diversity of Agaricus species was in peril. To remedy his concern, he offered a dollar for every Agaricus mushroom brought to him from the wild. Lambert conveyed his interest in preserving germplasm to his employees. After his death, his company was one of the first to preserve mushroom cultures in liquid nitrogen, where they will keep indefinitely, a method still used universally within the industry today.

Around 1915, Lambert moved his operation to Chester County, Pennsylvania, the heart of the mushroom industry. There, in Coatesville, PA, Lambert bought a property where the company still thrives. In 1925, Lambert selected and propagated a smooth white variation from a bed of cream mushrooms and named it "Snow White." Years later, the Dutch used the Snow White cultivar to develop the U1 and U3 strains grown today. In World War II, Lambert and his nephew were original producers of penicillin cultures for Sharp and Dohme Laboratories who produced antibiotics.

Mushroom culture, as well as American agriculture in general, has changed tremendously in the last hundred years. The mushroom industry has transformed from small farmers and home owners following directions in printed pamphlets to produce a seasonal crop of Agaricus large enough for their families, to highly technical and efficient corporations supplying a vast variety of mushroom species for market year-round. Lambert Spawn Company led the way in the mushroom industry for its first century in America. Our technical achievement, our commitment to the mushroom growers and the dedication to our industry as a whole, will continue to make Lambert the leader into the next century.

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