Prohibition and the Mushroom Farms

When Prohibition came to Hermann in nineteen nineteen, it did not arrive as an inconvenience. It arrived as a catastrophe. This town had built its entire economy around wine for nearly eighty years.

The German settlers had planted their vineyards on the limestone bluffs, pressed their wine in stone cellars, and shipped it across the country. In a single year, that industry was declared illegal. Stone Hill Winery, the second largest in the United States around nineteen hundred, was shut down completely.

The great underground cellars hand-dug from the limestone were leased out to mushroom growers, who found the cool, dark chambers perfectly suited to growing fungi. Many of the vineyards were plowed under and planted with corn, oats, and wheat. The town at the heart of the Missouri Rhineland became, for a time, just another struggling river community.

Repeal of Prohibition in nineteen thirty three did not immediately fix things. The Depression had driven away capital and customers, and then the Second World War followed. It was not until nineteen sixty five that the wine industry began returning, when James and Betty Held moved into the dormant Stone Hill Winery and began restoring it, buying it a few years later.

Other families followed over the next decade. By the nineteen eighties, tourists were making special trips to Hermann for the wineries, and the town was rebuilding the identity that Prohibition had nearly erased. Today the Hermann American Viticultural Area produces about one third of all wine made in the state of Missouri.