Bulletin Article - November 2005

THE MUSHROOM MAN
THE GREATEST TOADSTOOL TESTER OF HIS TIME
by Betty Lyons

Captain Charles McIlvaine was born in l840. During the Civil War he was Captain of the Pennsylvania Company H 97 Volunteers. After the war, he took a Grand Tour of Europe, as many young men did at the time. When he returned, around 1880, he decided to accept a railroad job in West Virginia. A very observant person, he noticed that the mountains alongside the tracks were often burned from the coals falling off the trains. These coals destroyed the flora and fauna of the West Virginia mountains. He also noticed that fungi, or mushrooms, grew well under those conditions, with the mountains turning white with their growth. He began sampling all the various kinds of mushrooms he could find. It was widely believed that eating the wild fungi would lead to immediate death; obviously, in his case it did not. However, it did earn him the nickname, Old Irongut.

While he was working on the railroad and sampling the mushrooms, he also took time to write plays, articles and children's stories, using the pseudonym, Tobe Hodge. Many of his writings were sold to professional papers and magazines. Others were written for specific situations. About 1895 he moved to Haddonfield where he lived at 67 West Kings Highway. While there he wrote a farce, "The New Women," for a Haddonfield organization.

During this period, he had ample opportunity to explore the world of mushrooms - "my little friends" -- around Hopkins Pond. It was here that he wrote the classic book, One Thousand American Fungi. It is a large, complete book, the first substantial American work of its kind. In its descriptive passages, the author told about his personal experiences assessing the edibility of each of the mushrooms and included his rather frightening "near misses." Revised since his death in l909, it is one of the most consulted books today on the topic of mycology.

Charles McIlvaine's book, Toadstools, Mushrooms, Fungi Edible and Poisonous. One Thousand American Fungi. How to select and cook the edible; how to distinguish and avoid the poisonous, was published by The Bowen-Merrill Company of Indianapolis in 1900. The thick book of 704 pages had a green cloth gilt cover, a colored frontispiece and 33 color plates, numerous half-tone plates and textual illustrations. Seven hundred fifty copies were printed for the first edition.