Dassel and the Ergot Museum

The small Minnesota town of Dassel is home to something genuinely unusual: a museum dedicated to ergot. Ergot is a fungus that infects rye and other grains, producing alkaloids that cause convulsions, hallucinations, and a burning sensation in the limbs that medieval Europeans called Saint Anthony's Fire. Historians have linked ergot poisoning to episodes of mass hysteria, and some scholars have argued it may have played a role in the Salem witch trials of sixteen ninety-two.

In agricultural Minnesota, ergot contamination of grain crops was a serious economic and health problem well into the twentieth century. Dassel's museum, housed in the former Universal Laboratories building, where ergot was processed from the mid nineteen thirties into the late nineteen sixties, tells the story of this overlooked fungus alongside the broader agricultural history of Meeker County. It is probably the only institution in the United States dedicated specifically to ergot's role in human history.